
Book 
Copyright )J^ 



copmiGKr DEPosm 




TKl-WEEKLYPoBLIC9\Tlot/oP TKE BC^T CU^^»/L^j^IMg!^^iJIlS£L[MM 




Vol. 8. No. 401. July 3, 188-(. Annual Subscription, |30.00. 



H 



English Men of Letters, Edited by John Morley 



lift 



I 



OF 



JOHNSON 



LESLIE STEPHEN 



Entered at the Post Office. N Y., as second-class inattt; 
Copyright, 1883, by John W, Lovell Co. 




NEW Vo'rT^?^^ 



+ To ^N • W • 1^ OVH L, L, • CoA\PAW Y+ 




py m^ m^ w^ w^ ay. j^ m^ ^f^ ^y ^f^ ^j 

neatOLOTH BINDDia for this volume can be obtained from any bookseller or newsdealer, price IScts 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



1. Hyperion 20 

2. Outre-Mer 20 

3. The Happy Boy 10 

4. Arne 10 

5. Frankenstein 10 

6. TlieLast of theMoliicans.20 

7. Clytie 20 

8. The Moonstone, Part 1 . 10 
g. The Moonstone, Part 1 1. 10 

10. Oliver Twist 20 

11. The Coming Race 10 

12. Leila 10 

13. The Three Spaniards. . .20 

14. The Tricks of the Greeks.2o 

15. L'AbW Constantin 20 

16. Freckles 20 

17. The Dark Colleen 20 

18. They wore Married 10 

19. Seekers After God 20 

20. The Spanish Nun 10 

21. Green Mountain Boys.. 20 

22. Fleurette 20 

23. Second Thoughts 20 

24. The New Magdalen 20 

25. Divorce 20 

26. Life of Washington 20 

27. Social Etiquette 15 

28. Single Heart, Double 

« Face ID 

29. Irene ; or, The Lonely 

Manor 20 

30. Vice Versa 20 

31. Ernest Maltravers 20 

32. The Haunted House... 10 

33. John Halifax 20 

34. 800 Leagues on the 
Amazon 10 

35. The Cryjitogram 10 

36. Life of Marion 20 

37. Paul and Virginia 10 

38. A Tale of Two Cities 20 

39. The Hermits 20 

40. /».. Adventure in Thule, 

J etc 10 

41. A Marriage in High Life2o 

42. Robin 20 

43. Two on a Tower 20 

44. Rasselas 10 

45. Alice ; a sequel to Er- 

nest Maltravers 20 

46. Duke of Kandos 20 

47. Baron Munchausen 10 

48. A Princess of Thule 20 

49. The Secret Despatch.. ..20 

50. Early Days of Christian- 
ity, 2 Parts, each 20 

51. Vicar of Wakefield 10 

52. Progress and Poverty.. .20 

53. The Spy 20 

54. East Lynnc 20 

55. A Strange Story 20 

56. Adam Bede, Part 1 15 

Adam. Bcde, Part II 15 

57. The Golden Shaft 20 

58. Portia 20 

59. Last Days of Pompeii. . .20 

60. The Two Duchesses 20 

61. Tom Brown 'sSchool Days. 20 

62. Wooing O't, 2 Pts. each. 15 

63. The Vendetta 20 

H. Hypatia, Part 1 15 

■* Hypatia, Part II 15 



Selma 15 

Margaret and her Brides- 
maids 20 

Horse Shoe Robinson, 

2 Parts, each 15. 

Gulliver's Travels 20 

Amos Barton 10 

The Berber 20 

Silas Marner 10 

Queen of the County . ..20 

Life of Cromwell 15 

Jane Eyre 20 

Child'sHist'ry of Engrd.2o 

Molly Bawn 20 

Pillone 15 

Phyllis 20 

Romola, Part 1 15 

Romola^ Part II 15 

Science in ShortChapters.20 

Zaiioni 20 

A Daughter of Heth 20 

Right and Wrong Uses of 

the Bible 20 

Night and Morning,Pt. 1.15 
NightandMorning,Pt.II 15 

Shandon Bells 20 

Monica to 

Heart and Science 20 

The Golden Calf 20 

The Dean's Daughter... 20 

Mrs. Geoffrey 20 

Pickwick Papers, Part 1 . 20 
Pickwick Papers,Part II. 20 

Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 

Macleod of Dare 20 

Tempest Tossed, Part I. jo 
Tempest Tossed, P't II. 20 
Letters from High Lat- 
itudes 20 

Gideon Fley ce 20 

India and Ceylon 20 

The Gypsy Queen 20 

The Admiral's Ward 20 

Nimport, 2 Parts, each.. 15 

Harry Holbrooke . 20 

Tritons, 2 Parts, each . . 15 
Let Nothing You Dismay. \o 
LadyAudley's Secret... 20 
Woman's Place To-day. 20 
Dunallan, 2 parts, each. 15 
Housekeeping and Home 

making 15 

No New Thing 20 

TheSpoopendykePapers.2o 

False Hopes 15 

Labor and Capital 20 

Wanda, 2 parts, each ... 15 
More Words about Bible. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, P't. 1. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, Pt. 1 1 . 20 
An Outline of Irish Hist. 10 

The Lerouge Case 20 

Paul Clifford 20 

A New Lease of Life.. .20 

Bourbon Lilies 20 

Other People's Money.. 20 

Lady of Lyons 10 

Ameline de Bourg 15 

A Sea Queen.- 20 

The Ladies, Lindores. ..20 

Haunted Hearts 10 

Lovs, Lord Beresfordo.ao 



27. Under Two Flags, Pt I. 20 
Under Two Flags, Pt II.20 

28. Money 10 

29. In Peril of His Life 20 

30. India; What can it teach 

us? 20 

31. Jets and Flashes 20 

32. Moonshine and Margue- 
rites 10 

33. Mr. Scarborough's 
Family, 2 Parts, each . . 15 

34. Aiden 15 

35. Tower of Percemont.. ..20 

36. Yolande 20 

37. Cruel London 20 

38. The Gilded Clique 20 

39. Pike County Fo'k;, 20 

40. Cricket on the Hearth.. 10 

41. Henry Esmond 20 

42. Strange Adventures of a 
Phaeton 20 

43. Denis Duval 10 

44. 01dCuriosityShop,P't 1. 15 
OldCuriosityShop.P'rt 1 1. 15 

45. Ivanhoe, Part 1 15 

Ivanhoe, Part II i; 

46. White Wings 20 

47. The Sketch Book 20 

48. Catherine 10 

49. Janet's Repentance 10 

50. Barnaby Rudge, Part I.. 15 
Barnaby Rudge, Part 1 1. 15 

51. Felix Holt 20 

52. Richelieu . . 10 

53. Sunrise, Part 1 15 

53. Sunrise, Part II 15 

54. Tour of the World in 80 
Days 20 

55. Mystery of Orc'val 20 

56. Lovel, the Widower 10 

57. Romantic Adventures of 

a Milkmaid 10 

58. DavidCopperfield, Part 1.20 
DavidCopperfield,P'rt II. 20 

59. Charlotte Temple . . - . . 10 

60. Rienzi, 2 Parts, each ... 15 

61. Promise of Marriage 10 

62. Faith and Unfaith 20 

63. The Happy Man to 

64. BaiTy Lyndon 20 

65. Eyre's Acquittal 10 

66. 20,000 Leagues Under t e 
Sea . . 20 

67. Anti-Slavery Days 20 

68. Beauty's Daughters 20 

69. Beyond the Sunrise 20 

70. Hard Times 20 

71. Tom Cringle's Log 20 

72. Vanity Fair 30 

73. Undergiiiund Russia 20 

74. Middlemarch,2 Pts.each.20 

75. Sir Tom 20 

76. Pelham 20 

77. The Story of Ida 10 

78. Madcap Violet 23 

79. The Little Pilgrim 10 

80. Kilmeny 2< 

81. Whist, or Bumblepuppy?.it> 

82. That Beautiful Wretch.. 20 

83. Her Mother's Sin 20 

84. Green Pastures, etc 20 

8j. Mysterious Island, Pt I.i; 




gEAUTY. 

How to Beautify the Complexion. 

All women know th it it is beauty, mi licrtlian goniufs, which all generatinns 
i.f men ha\ t woi^hipptd iii the sex. Can it b '. wobdered at, then, that to m\u h 
f v\()mau's time and attention should be directed to the means of deveiopiTi;; 
i!nd preserviD'Z that bejiniy! The most important adjunct to beauty is a dear, 
miiooth, soft and beautiful sliin. With this essential a lady appearu handi^onie, 
even jf her feiUures are not perfect. 

Ladies afllictt d with Tan, Freckles, Rough or Discolored Skin, should lose 
no time in procuring and applying 

IsB^IRD S BLOOM OF YOUTH. 

It will immediately obliterate all such imperfections, and is entirely harm- 
loss. It has been chemically analyzed l.iy the Board of Health of New York City, 
and pronounced entirely free from any material injurious to the health or skin. 

Over two million ladies have used this delightful toilet preparation, and in 
every instanre it has given entire satisfaction. Ladies, if you desire to be beauti- 
ful, give LAIRD'S BLOOM OF YOUTH a trial, and be convinced of its won- 
derful efflcacy. Sold hy Fancy Goods Dealers and Druggists everywhere. 
Price, T5c. i>er BotUc. Depot, 83 Jolm St., N, Y. 



FAIR FACES 

And fair, in the literal and most pleasing sense, are 
those kept fresu and pure by the use of 



f^^. 




This article, which for the p.ist flftecti yLT.rs has 
had the commendation of every lady who uses it, is 
mddd from the best oils, combined with just the 
proper amount of glycerine and chemically pure 
carbolic acid, and is the realization of a i»EK.- 
FKCT SOAP. 

It will positively keep the skin fresh, clear, and white; removing tai., 
freckles and discolorations from the skin; healing all eruptions; prevent chap- 
ping or roughness ; allay irritation and soreness ; and overcome all unpleasant 
oBects from perspiration. 

Is pleasantly perfumed ; and neither when using or afterwards is the slight 
f St odor of the acid perceptible. 



C!i,EANS and preserves the teeth; cools and refreshes the mouth; sweetens the 
lireath, and is in every way an unrivalled dental preparation. 

BUCHAIV'S CARBOIilC ME1>I€S1VAI. SOAP cures all 
Eruptions and Skin Diseases. 



FOR IVIOTHERSJND DAUGHTERS. 

A Manual of Hygiene for Women and the Household. 

Illustrated. By Mrs. E. G. Cook, M. D. 
12mo, extra cloth, - ...... $1.50 

This new work has already received strong words of 
commendation from competent judges who have had the 
opportunity of examining it, as the following will show: 

Commonwealth, Boston, Mass. 
" This is a sensible booli, written in a clear, jjlain. yet delicate style; a book 
whicli ouglit to be iu the hands of all wo-nen and girls old enough to need its 
counsel. It treats of topics on which hinge mucuof the world's woe, because 
of silent suffering, pale cheeks and broken cou-tftutions." 

Enquirer, Philadelphia, Pcnn. 
"It is a plain, sensible talk on subjects usually considered too delicate to be 
either spoken or written about, but here put in a way that cannot oflfend any- 
body. It is a book that every mother should read and then put in her daughter's 
hand."' 

N. Y. Times. 
"A book of sound advice to women." 

Christian Intelligencer, N. T. City. 
"Written by a women who speaks from the stand-point of an caucatcd ex- 
pericnc3. Its stylo is simple, chaste and earnest, and it treats of subjects 
which it vastly concerns wives, mothers and daughters to know." 
National Tribune, Washington. D. C. 
"The information which this book afEords is precisely what every woman 
ought to have." 

Zion's Herald, Boston, Mass. 
" In clear and plain style, with the modesty and the knowledge which an 
educated wob an has of her subject, is presented just what the young head of 
a family ough . to know about herself and those who may come under her care. 
It is an admirable book of its kind." 

JVew York Star. 
" The work opens with a chapter on physical culture, which is followed by 
essays on physiology in general. The feeding of children, the rights of chil- 
dren, the question of education, etc., are all discussed, r.vd the work is fully 
illustrated." 

iV. ■ Y. Medical Times. 
" It treats of the importance of physical culture and hygiene. The chapters 
on ' Intemperance and Tobacco' are especially v orthy of note. Such books ;.s 
this manual are to bo welcomed as helpere-on iu the good cause of uplifting 
and \>erfecting iiumanity.'' 

Scientific American, N". Y. 
" The importance of physical culture for women, with especial reference to 
their duties in the household and the raising and care of children, are promi- 
nently treated in this book." 

Indianapolis Journal, Indiana, 
" Some work of this kind is indispensable and this one seems to be perfectly 
suited to the purpose for which it was prepared." 

Presbyterian Banner, Pittsburg, Pa. 

" Prepared by a woman who has herself received a medical training, it en 

tains for mothers instruction and warnini.; that should be carefully considered." 

LADIES WANTED to act as Agents, to whom liberal 
terms will be given. Copies sent by mail, post-paid, on 
receipt of price, ^1.50. Address 

KYGIENIC PUBL.ISHING CO., 91 T Broadway, New York, 
or 482 Van Buren Street, MiUvaukee, "Wis. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 



BY 

LESLIE STEPHEN 



NEW YORK: 

JOHN W. LQVELL COMPAN\^ 

14 AND i6 VusEY Street. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

CHAPTER I. 

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE. 

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709. His father, 
Michael Johnson, was a bookseller, highly respected by the cathe- 
dral clergy, and for a time sufficiently prosperous to be a magistrate 
of the town, and, in the year of his son's birth, sheriff of the county. 
He opened a bookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns, in- 
cluding Birmingham, which was as yet unable to maintain a separate 
bookseller. The tradesman often exaggerates the prejudices of the 
class whose wants he supplies, and Michael Johnson was probably 
a more devoted High Churchman and Tory than many of the ca- 
thedral clergy themselves. He reconciled himself with difficulty 
to taking the oaths against the exiled dynasty. He was a man of 
considerable mental and physical power, but tormented by hypo- 
chondriacal tendencies. His son inherited a share both of his con- 
stitution and of his principles. Long afterwards Samuel associated 
with his childish days a faint but solemn recollection of a lady in 
diamonds and long black hood. The lady was Queen Anne, to 
whom, in compliance with superstition just dying a natural death, 
he had been taken by his mother to be touched for the king's evil. 
The touch was ineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he 
ought to have been presented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts 
in Rome. Disease and superstition had thus stood by his cradle, 
and they never quitted him during life. The demon of hypochon- 
dria was aUvays lying in wait for him, and could be exorcised for a 
time only by hard work or social excitement. Of this we shall hear 
enough ; but it may be as well to sum up at once some of the phy 
sical characteristics which marked him through life and greatly 
influenced his career. 

The disease had scarred and disfigured features otherwise reg 
ular and always impressive. It had seriously injured his eyes, en 
tirely destroying, it seems, the sight of one. He could not, it is 
said, distinguish a friend's face half a yard off, and pictures were to 
him meaningless patches, in v.'hich he could never see the resem- 
blance to their ol3Jects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated ; 

(7) 



8 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

for he could see enough to condemn a portrait of himself. He ex- 
pressed some annoyance when Reynolds had painted him with a pen 
held close to his eye ; and protested that he would not be handed 
down to posterity as '• blinking Sam." It seems that habits of minute 
attention atoned in some degree for this natural defect. Boswell 
tells us how Johnson once corrected him as to the precise shape of 
a mountain ; and Mrs. Tiirale says that he was a close and exacting 
critic of ladies' dress, even to the accidental position of a riband. 
He could even lay down jesthetical canons upon such matters. 
He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to a " little 
creature." " What,"' lie asked, " have not all insects gay colours ? ' 
His insensibility to music was even more pronounced than his dul- 
ness of sight. On hearing it said, in praise of a musical perform- 
ance, that it was in any case difficult, his feeling comment was, 
" I wish it had been impossible ! " 

The queer convulsions by which he amazed all beholders were 
proliably connected with his' disease, though he and Reynolds as- 
cribed them simply to habit. When entering a doorway with his 
blind companion. Miss Williams, he would suddenly desert her on 
the step in order to "whirl and Iwist about " in strange gesticula- 
tions. The performance partook of the na.ture of a superstitious 
ceremonial. He would stop in a street or the middle of a room to 
go through it correctly. Once he collected a laughing mob in 
Twickenham meadows by his antics; his hands imitating the 
motions of a jockey riding at full speed and his feet twisting in 
and out to make heels and toes touch alternately. He presently 
sat down and took out a Grotiiis De Verifatc, over which he "see 
sawed " so violently that the mob ran back to see what was the 
matter. Once in such a fit he suddenly twisted off the shoe of a 
lady who sat by him. Sometimes he seemed to be ' obeying some 
hidden impulse, which commanded him to touch every pjost in a 
street or tread on the centre of every paving-stone, and would 
return if his task had not been accurately performed. 

In spite of such oddities, he was not only possessed of physical 
power corresponding to his great height and massive stature, but 
was something of a proficient at athletic exercises. He was con- 
versant with the theory, at least, of boxing ; a knowledge proba- 
bly acquired from an uncle who kept the ring at Smithfield for a 
year, and was never beaten in boxing or wrestling. His consti- 
tutional fearlessness wouVl have made him a formidable antagonist. 
Hawkins describes the oak staff, six feet in length and increasing 
from one to three inches in diameter, which lay ready to his hand 
when he expected an attack from I\Tacpherson of Ossian celel^rity. 
Once he is said to have taken up a cliair at tl)e theatre upon which 
a man had seated himself during his ten.porary absence, and to 
have tossed it and its occupant bodily into the pit. He would 
swim into pools said to be dangerous, beat huge dogs into peace, 
climb trees, and even run races and jump gates. Once at least he 
went out foxhunting, and though he despised the anuK'ement, was 
deeply touched by the complimentary assertion that he rode as well 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. g 

as the most illiterate fellow in England. Perhaps the mostwhimsi' 
cal of his performances was when, in his fifty-fifth year, he went to 
the top of a high hill with his friend Langton. " I have not had a 
roll for a long time," said the great lexicographer suddenly, and, 
after deliberately emptying his pockets, he laid himself parallel to 
the edge of the hill, and descended, turning over and over till he 
came to the bottom. We may believe, as Mrs. Thrale remarks 
upon his jumping over a stool to show that he was not tired by his 
hunting, that his performances in this kind were so strange and 
uncouth that a fear for the safety of his bones quenched the 
spectator's tendency to laugh. 

In such a strange case was imprisoned one of the most vigorous 
intellects of the time. Vast strength hampered by clumsiness and 
associated with grievous disease, deep and massive powers of feel- 
ing limited by narrow though acute perceptions, were characteristic 
both of soul and body. These peculiarities were manifested from 
his early infancy. Miss Seward, atypical specimen of the provin- 
cial ^;V«>«j.y', attempted to trace them in an epitaph which he was 
said to have written at the age of three. 

Here lies good master duck 

Whom Samuel Johnson trod on ; 
If it had lived, it had been good luck, 

For then we had had an odd one. 

The verses, however, were really made by his father, who passed 
them off as the child's, and illustrate nothing but the paternal vanity. 
In fact the boy was regarded as something of an infant prodigy. 
His great powers of memory, characteristic of a mind singularly 
retentive of all impressions, were early developed. He seemed to 
learn by intuition. Indolence, as in his after life, alternated with 
brief efforts of strenuous exertion. His want of sight prevented 
him from sharing in the ordinary childish sports ; and one of his 
great pleasures was in reading old romances — a taste which he re- 
tained through life. Boys of this temperament are generally de- 
s])ised by their fellows; but Johnson seems to have had the power 
of enforcing the respect of his companions. Three of the lads used 
to come for him in the morning and carry him in triumph to school, 
seated upon the shoulders of one and supported on each side by 
his companions. 

After learning to read at a dame-school, and from a certain Tom 
Brown, of whom it is only recorded that he published a spelling-book 
and dedicated it to the Universe, young Samuel was sent to the Licli- 
field Grammar School, and was afterwards, for a short time, appar- 
ently in the character of pupil-teacher, at the school of Stourbridge, 
in Worcestershir-*. ■''•A^pod deal of Latin was " whipped into 
him," and though he complained of the excessive severity of two of 
his teachers, he was always a believer in the virtues of the rod. 
A child, he said, who is flogged, " gets his task, and there's an end 
on't ; whereas by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, 



I o SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

you lay tlie foundations of lasting mischief ; you make brothers 
and sisters hate each other." In practice, indeed, this stern dis- 
ciplinarian seems to have been specially indulgent to children. 
The memory of his own sorrows made him value their happiness, 
and he rejoiced greatly when he at last persuaded a schoolmaster 
to remit the old-fashioned holiday-task. 

Johnson left school at sixteen and spent two years at home, prob- 
ably in learning his father's business. This seems to have been 
the chief period of his studies. Long afterwards he said that he 
knew almost as much at eighteen as he did at the age of fifty-three 
— the date of the remark. His father's shop would give him many 
opportunities, and he devoured what came in his way with the un- 
discriminating eagerness of a young student. His intellectual re- 
sembled iiis physical appetite. He gorged books. He tore the 
hearts out of them, but did not study systematically. Do you read 
books through ? he asked indignantly of some one who expected 
from him such supererogatory labour. His memory enabled him 
to accumulate great stores of a desultory and unsystematic knowl- 
ledge. Somehow he became a fine Latin scholar, though never 
first rate as a Grecian. The direction of his studies was partly 
determined by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch, lying on a shelf 
where he was looking for apples ; and one of his earliest literary 
plans, never carried out, was an edition of Politian, with a history 
of Latin poetry from the time of Petrarch. When he went to the 
University at the end of this period, he was in possession of a very 
unusual amount of reading. 

Meanwhile he was beginning to feel the pressure of poverty. 
His father's affairs were probably getting into disorder. One 
anecdote — it is one which it is difiicult to read without emotion — 
refers to this period. Many years afterwards, Johnson, worn by 
disease and the hard struggle of life, was staying at Lichfield, where 
a few old friends still survive, but in which every street must have 
revived the memories of the many who had long since gone over 
to the majority. He was missed one morning at breakfast, and did 
not return till supper-time. Then he told how his time had been 
passed. On that day fifty years before, his father, confined by illness, 
had begged him to take his place to sell books at a stall at Uttox- 
eter. Pride made him refuse. " To do away with the sin of. this 
disobedience, I this day went in a post-chaise to Uttoxeter, and 
going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my 
head and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father 
had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and 
the inclemency of the weather ; a penance by which I trust I have 
propitiated Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy 
to my father." If the anecdote illustrates the touch of superstition 
in Johnson's mind, it reveals too that s|^-««H^epth of tenderness 
which ennobled his character. No repentance can ever wipe out 
the past or make it be as though it had not been ; but the remorse 
of a fine character may be transnuiled into a permanent source of 
nobler views of life and the world. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. x i 

There are difficulties in determining the circumstances and du- 
ration of Johnson's stay at Oxford. He began residence at Pem- 
broke College in 1728. It seems probable that he received some 
assistance from a gentleman whose son took him as companion, 
and from the clergy of Lichfield, to whom his father was known, 
and who were aware of the son's talents. Possibly his college 
assisted him during part of the time. It is certain that he left 
without taking a degree, though he probably resided for nearly 
three years. It is certain, also, that his father's bankruptcy made 
his stay difficult, and that the period must have been one of 
trial. 

The effect of the Oxford residence upon Johnson's mind was 
characteristic. The lad already suffered from the attacks of mel- 
ancholy, which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity. 
At Oxford, Law's Serious CaJl g3.vc him the strong religious im- 
pressions which remained through life. But he does not seem 
to have been regarded as a gloomy or a religious youth by his 
contemporaries. When told in after years that he had been de- 
scribed as a " gay and frolicsome fellow," he replied, " Ah ! sir, I 
was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for 
frolic. I was miserably poor, and 1 thought to fight my way by my 
literature and my wit ; so I disregarded all power and all authority." 
Though a hearty supporter of authority in principle, Johnson was 
distinguished through life by the strongest spirit of personal in- 
dependence and self-respect. He held, too, the sound doctrine, 
deplored by his respectable biographer Hawkins, that the scholar's 
life, like the Christian's, levelled all distinctions of rank. When 
an officious benefactor put a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw 
them away with indignation. He seems to have treated his tutors 
with a contempt which Boswell politely attributed to " great forti- 
tude of mind," but Johnson himself set down as " stark insensibility." 
The life of a poor student is not, one may fear, even yet exempt 
from much bitterness, and in those days the position was far more 
servile than at present. The servitors and sizars had much to 
bear from richer companions. A proiid melancholy lad, conscious 
of great powers, had to meet with hard rebuffs, and tried to meet 
them by returning scorn for scorn. 

Such distresses, however, did not shake Johnson's rooted Tory- 
ism. He fully imbibed, if he did not already share, the strongest 
prejudices of the place, and his misery never produced a revolt 
against the system, though it may have fostered insolence to -indi- 
viduals. Three of the most eminent men with whom Johnson came 
in contact in later life, had also been students at Oxford. Wesley, 
his senior by six years, was a fellow of Lincoln whilst Johnson was 
an undergraduate, and was learning at Oxford the necessity of 
rousing his countrymen from the religious lethargy into which they 
.jad sunk. " Have not pride and haughtiness of spirit, impatience, 
and peevishness, sloth and indolence, gluttony and sensuality, and 
even a proverbial uselessness been objected to us, perhaps not al- 
ways by our enemies nor wholly without ground ? " So said Wes' 



12 SAMUELJOHNSON. 

ley, preaching before the University of Oxford in 1744 and the 
words in his mouth imply more than tlie preacher's formahty. 
Adam Smith, Johnson's junior by fourteen years, was so impressed 
by the utter indifference of Oxford authorities to tlieir duties, as to 
find in it an admirable illustration of the consequences of the neglect 
of the true principles of supply and demand implied in the endow- 
ment of learning. Gibbon, his junior i)y twenty-eight years, passed 
at Oxford the " most idle and unprofitable " months of his whole 
life ; and was, he said, as willing to disclaim the university for a 
mother, as she could be to renounce him for a son. Oxford, as 
judged by these men, was remarkable as an illustration of the 
spiritual and intellectual decadence of a body which at other times 
has been a centre of great movements of thought. Johnson, though 
his experience was rougher than any of the three, loved Oxford as 
though she had not been a harsh step-mother to his youth. Sir, he 
said fondly of his college, "we are a nest of singing-birds." 
Most of the strains are now pretty well forgotten, and some of them 
must at all times have been such as we scarcely associate with the 
nightingale. Johnson, however, cherished his college friendships, 
delighted in paying visits to his old university, and was deeply 
touched by the academical honours by which Oxford long after- 
wards recognised an eminence scarcely fostered by its protection. 
Far from sharing the doctrines of Adam Smith, he only regretted 
that the universities were not richer, and expressed a desire which 
will be understood by advocates of the " endowment of research," 
that there were many places of a thousand a year at Oxford. 

On leaving the University, in 1731, the world was all before 
him. His father died in the end of the year, and Jolinson's whole 
immediate inheritance was twenty pounds. Where was he to turn 
for daily bread .-" Even in those days, most gates were barred with 
•gold and opened but to golden keys. The greatest chance for a 
poor man was probably through tlie Church. The career of War- 
burton, who rose from a similar position to a bishopric might have 
been rivalled by Johnson, and his connexions with Lichfield might, 
one would suppose, have helped him to a start. It would be easy to 
speculate upon causes which might have hindered such a career. 
In later life, he more than once refused to take orders upon the 
promise of a living. Johnson, as we know him, was a man of the 
world ; though a religious man of the world. He represents the 
' secular rather than the ecclesiastical type. So far as his mode of 
teaching goes, he is rather a disciple of Socrates than of St. Paul 
or Wesley. According to him, a " tavern-chair " was "the throne 
of human felicity," and supplied a better arena than the jiulpil for 
the utterance of his message to mankind. And. though his exter- 
nal circumstances doubtless determined his method, there was 
much in his character which made it congenial. Johnson's religious 
emotions were such as to make habitual reserve almost a sanitary 
necessity. They were deeply coloured by his constitutional melan 
choly. Fear of death and hell were prominent in his personal 
creed. To trade upon his feelings like a charlatan would have 



SAMUEL /OHNSOiV: 1 3 

been abhorrent to his masculine character ; and to give them full 
and frequent utterance like a genuine teacher of mankind would 
have been to imperil his sanity. If he had gone through the excite- 
ment of a Methodist conversion, he would probably have ended liis 
days in a madhouse. 

Such considerations, however, were not, one may guess, dis- 
tinctly present to Johnson himself ; and the offer of a college fellow- 
ship or of private patronage might probably have altered his career. 
He might have become a learned recluse or a struggling Parson 
Adams. College fellowships -were less open to talent then than 
now, and patrons were never too propitious to the uncouth giant, 
who had to force his way by sheer labour, and fight for his own 
hand. Accordingly, the young scholar tried to coin his brains into 
money by the most depressing and least hopeful of employments. 
By becoming an usher in a school, he could a least turn his talents 
to account vvith little delay, and that was the most pressing consid- 
erations. By one schoolmaster he was rejected on the ground that 
his infirmities would excite the ridicule of the boys. Under an- 
other he passed some months of "complicated misery," and could 
never think of the school without horror and aversion. Finding 
this situation intolerable, he settled in Birmingham, in 1733, to be 
near an old schoolfellow, named Hector, who was apparently be- 
ginning to practise as a surgeon. Johnson seems to have had 
some acquaintances among the comfortable families in the neigh- 
bourhood ; but his means of living are obscure. Some small liter- 
ary work came in his way. He contributed essays to a local paper, 
and translated a book of Travels in Abyssinia. For this, his first 
publication, he received five guineas. In 1734 he made certain 
overtures to Cave, a London publisher, of the result of which I 
shall have to speak presently. For the present it is prettv clear 
that the great problem of self-support had been very inadequately 
solved. 

Having no money and no prospects, Johnson naturally married. 
The attractions of the lady were not very manifest to others than 
her husband. She was the widow of a Birmingham mercer named 
Porter. Her age at the time (1735) of the second marriage was 
forty-eight, the bridegroom being not quite twenty-six. The biog- 
rapher's eye was not fixed upon Johnson till after his wife's death, 
and we have little in the way of authentic description of her 
person and character, Garrick, who had known "her, said that she 
was very fat, with cheeks coloured both by paint and cordials, 
flimsy and fantastic in dress and affected in her manners. She is 
said to have treated her husband with some contempt, adopting 
the airs of an antiquated beauty, which he returned by elaborate 
deference. Garrick used his wonderful powers of mimicry to make 
fun of the uncouth caresses of the husband, and the courtly 
Beauclerc used to provoke the smiles of his audience by repeat- 
mg Johnson's assertion that " it was a love-match on both sides." 
One incident of the wedding-day was ominous. As the newly- 
married couple rode back from church, Mrs. Johnson showed her 



J 4 SAMUEL JOHNSOJV. 

spirit by reproaching her husband for riding too fast, and then 
for lagging behind. Resolved " not to be made the slave of Ca- 
price," he pushed on brisi<ly till he was fairly out of sight. VVlien 
she rejoined him, as he, of course, took care that she should soon 
do, she was in tears. Mrs. Johnson apparently knew how to 
gain supremacy : but, at any rate, Johnson loved her devotedly 
during life, and clung to her memory during a widowhood of more 
than thirty years, as fondly as if they had been the most pattern 
hero and heroine of romantic fiction. 

Whatever Mrs. Johnson's charms, she seems to have been a 
woman of good sense and some literary judgment. Johnson's 
grotesque appearance did not prevent her from saying to her 
daughter on their first introduction, " This is the most sensible 
man I ever met." Her praises were, we may believe, sweeter to 
him than those of the severest critics, or the most fervent of per- 
sonal flatterers. Like all good men, Johnson loved good women, 
and liked to have on hand a flirtation or two, as warm as might be 
within the bounds of due decorum. But nothing affected his fidel- 
ity to his Letty or displaced her image in his mind. He remem- 
bered her in many solemn prayers, and such words as "this was 
dear Letty's book : " or, " this was a prayer which dear Letty was 
accustomed to say," were found written by him in many of her 
books of devotioij. 

Mrs. Johnson had one other recommendation — a fortune, namelv, 
of ^Soo — little enough, even then, as a provision for the support of 
tlie married pair, but enough to help Johnson to make a fresh start. 
In 1736, there appeared an advertisement in the Centle7nan''s Mag- 
azine. " At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentle- 
men are boarded and taught the Latin and Greek ianguages by 
Samuel Johnson." If, as seems probable, Mrs Johnson's money 
supplied the funds for this venture, it was an unlucky speculation. 

Johnson was not fitted to be a pedagogue. Success in that pro- 
fession implies skill in the management of pupils, but perhaps still 
more decidedly in the management of parents. Johnson had little 
qualifications in either way. As a teacher he would probably have 
been alternately despotic and over-indulgent ; and, on the other 
hand, at a single glance the rough Dominie Sampson would be 
enough to frighten the ordinary parent off his premises. Very few 
ijupils came, and thev seem to have profited little, if a story as told 
of two of his pupils refers to this time. After some'months of in- 
struction m English history, he asked them who had destroyed the 
monasteries ? One of them gave no answer ; the other replied 
"Jesus Christ." Jolmson, however, could boast of one eminent 
pupil in David Garrick, though, by Garrick's account, his master 
was of little service except as affording an excellent mark for his 
early powers of ridicule. The school, or "academy," failed after 
a year and a half ; and Johnson, once more at a loss for employ- 
ment, reso'.ved to try the great experiment, made so often and so 
often unsuccessfully. He left Lichfield to seek his fortune in Lon- 
don. Garrick accompanied him, and the two brought a common 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. i^ 

letter of introduction to the master of an academy from Gilbert 
Walmsley, registrar of tlie Prerogative Court in Lichfield. Long 
afterwards Johnson took an opportunity in the Lives of the Poets, 
of expressing his warm regard for the memory of his early friend, 
to whom he had been recommended by a community of literary 
tastes, in spite of party differences and great inequality of age. 
Walmsley says in his letter, that " one Johnson " is about to accom- 
pany Garrick to London, in the order to try his fate with a tragedy 
and get himself employed in translation. Johnson, he adds, " is a 
very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a 
fine tragedy writer." 

The letter is dated March 2nd, 1737. Before recording what 
is known of his early career thus started, it will be well to take a 
glance at the general condition of the profession of Literature in 
England at this period. 



,6 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



CHAPTER II. 

LITERARY CAREER. 

" No man but a blockhead," said Johnson, " ever wrote except 
for money." The doctrine is, of course, perfectly outrageous, and 
specially calculated to shock people who like to keep it for their 
private use, instead of proclaiming it in public. But it is a good 
expression of that huge contempt for the foppery of high-flown sen- 
timent which, as is not uncommon with Johnson, passes into some- 
thino- which would be cynical if it were not half-humorous. In this 
case^it implies also the contempt of the professional for the ama- 
teur. Johnson despised gentlemen who dabbled in his craft, as a 
man whose life is devoted to music or painting despises the ladies 
and gentlemen who treat those arts as fashionable accomplishments. 
An author was, according to him, a man who turned out books as 
a bricklayer turns out houses or a tailor coats. So long- as he sup- 
plied a good article and got a fair price, he was a fool to grumble, 
and a humbug to affect loftier motives. 

Johnson was not the first professional author, in this sense, but 
perhaps the first man who made the profession respectable. The 
principal habitat of authors, in his age, was Grub Street— a region 
whicli, in later years, has ceased to be ashamed of itself, and has 
adopted the more pretentious name Bohemia. The original Grub 
Street, it is said, first became associated with authorshij:) during 
the increase of pamphlet literature, produced by the civil wars. 
Fox, the martyrologist, was one of its original inhal)itants. An- 
other of its heroes was a certain Mr. Welby, of whom the sole rec- 
ord is, that he " lived there forty years without being seen of any." 
In fact, it was a region of holes and corners, calculated to illus- 
trate that great advantage of London life, which a friend of Bos- 
well's described by saying, that a man could there be always " close 
to his l)uri»*w." The "burrow "which received the luckless wight, 
was indeed no pleasant refuge. Since poor Gree#, in the earliest 
generation of dramatists, bought his " groat's worth of wit with a mil- 
lion of repentance," too many of his brethren had trodden the path 
which led to hopeless misery or death in a tavern brawl. The his- 
tory of men who had to support themselves liy their pens, is a 
record of almost univtrs d '^doom. The names of .Spenser, of Butli r. 
and of Otway, arc en<iu:;li to remind us that even warm contenv 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 17 

porary recognition was not enougli to raise an author above the 
fear of dying in want of necessaries. The two great dictators of 
literature, Ben Johnson in the earlier and Dryden in the later part 
of the century, only kept their heads above water by help of the 
laureate's pittance, though reckless imprudence, encouraged by the 
precarious life, was the cause of mucn o[ their sufferings. Patron- 
age gave but a fitful resource, and the- author could hope at most 
but an occasionable crust, flung to him from better provided tables. 

In the happy days of Queen Anne, it is true, there had been a 
gleam of prosperit}^ Many authors, Addison, Congreve, Swift, and 
others of less name, had won by their pens not only temporary profits 
but permanent places. The class which came into power at the 
Revolution was willing for a time, to share some of the public pat- 
ronage with men distinguished for intellectual eminence. Patronage 
was tiberal when the funds came out of other men's pockets. But, 
as the system of party government developed, it soon became evi- 
dent that this involved a waste of power. There were enough po- 
litical partisans to absorb all the comfortable sinecures to be had ; 
and such money as was still spent upon literature, was given in 
return for services equally degrading to giver and receiver. Nor 
did the patronage of literature reach the poor inhabitants of Grub 
Street. Addison's poetical power might suggest or justify the gift 
of a place from his elegant friends ; but a man like De Foe, who 
really looked to his pen for great part of his daily subsistence, was 
below the region of such prizes, and was obliged in later years not 
only to write inferior books for money, but to sell himself and act 
as a spy upon his fellows. One great man, it is true, made an in- 
dependency by literature. Pope received some _2^8ooo for his trans- 
lation of Homer, by the then popular mode of subscription — a kind 
of compromise between the systems of patronage and public support. 
But his success caused little pleasure in Grub Street. No love was 
lost between the poet and the dwellers in this dismal region. Pope 
was its deadliest enemy, and carried on an internecine warfare with 
its inmates, which has enriched our language with a great satire, 
but which wasted his powers upon low objects, and tempted him 
into disgraceful artifices. The life of the unfortunate victim^, 
pilloried in the Z^^z/cYrtf/ and-accused of the unpardonable sins of 
poverty and dependence, was too often one which miglit have ex- 
torted sympathy even from a thin-skinned poet and critic. 

Illustrations of the manners and customs of that Grub Street of 
which Johnson was to become an inmate are only too abundnnt. 
The best writers of the day could tell of hardships endured in tint 
dismal region. Richardson went on the sound principle of keeping 
his shop that hi^ shop might keep him. But the other great novel- 
ists of the century have painted from life the miseries of an author's 
existence. Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith have described the 
poor wretches with a vivid force which gives sadness to the reflec- 
tion that each of those great men was drawing upon his own ex- 
perience, and that they each died in distress. The Case of Authors 
by Profession to quote the title of a pamphlet by Ralph, was indeed 

2 



1 8 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

a wretched one, when the greatest of their number had an incessant 
struggle to keep the wolf from the door. The life o^ an author re- 
sembled the proverbial existence of the flying-fish, chased by enemies 
in sea and in air ; he only escaped from the slavery of 'the book- 
seller's garret, to fly from the bailiff or rot in the debtor's ward or 
the spunging-house. Many strange half-pathetic and half-ludicrous 
anecdotes survive to recall the sorrows and the recklessness of the 
luckless scribblers who, like one of Johnson's acquaintance. " lived 
in London and hung loose upon society." 

There was Samuel Boyse, for example, whose poem on the Deity 
is quoted with high praise by Fielding. Once Johnson had gener- 
ously exerted himself for his comrade in misery, and collected 
enough money by sixpences to get the poet's clothes out of pawn. 
Two days afterwards, Boyse had spent the money and was found 
in bed, covered only with a blanket, through two holes in which he 
passed his arms to write. Boyse, it appears, when still in this posi- 
tion would lay out his last half-guinea to buy truffles and mush- 
rooms for his last scrap of beef. Of another scribbler Johnson 
said, " I honour Derrick for his strength of mind. One night when 
Floyd (another poor author) was wandering about the streets at night, 
he. found Derrick fast asleep upon a bulk. Upon being suddenly 
awaked. Derrick started up; ' My dear Floyd, I am sorry to see 
you in this destitute state ; will you go home with me to my lodg- 
ings? ' " Authors in such circumstances might be forced into such 
a wonderful contract as that which is reported to have been drawn 
up by one Gardner with Rolt and Christopher Smart. They were 
to write a monthly miscellany, sold at sixpence, and to have a third 
of the profits ; but they were to write nothing else, and the contract 
was to last for ninety-nine years. Johnson himself summed up the 
trade upon earth by the lines in which Virgil describes the entrance 
to hell ; thus translated by Dryden : — 

Just in the gate and in the jaws of hell, 
Revengeful cares and sullen sorrows dwell. 
And pale diseases and repining age, 
Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage : 
Here toils and Death and Death's half-brother, Sleep- 
Forms, terrible to view, their sentry keep. 

" Now," said Johnson, " almost all these apply exactly to an 
author; these are the concomitants of a printing-house." 

Judicious authors, indeed, were learning how to make literature 
pay. Some of them belonged to the class who understood the 
great truth that the scissors are a very superior implement to the 
pen considered as a tool of literary trade. Such, for example, was 
that respectable Dr. John Campbell, whose parties Johnson ceased 
to frequent lest Scotchmen should say of any good bits of work, 
" Ay, ay, he has learnt this of Cawmell." Campbell, he said quaintly, 
was a good man, a pious man. " I am afraid he has not been in 
the inside of a church for many years ; but he never passes a 
church without pulling off his hat. This shows he has good pnri-. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. ig 

ciples,'' — of which in fact there seems to be some less questionable 
evidence. Campbell supported himself by writings chiefly of the 
Encyclopedia or Gazetteer kind; and became, still in Johnson's 
phrase, "the richest author that ever grazed the common of litera- 
ture." A more singular and less reputable character was that im- 
pudent quack, Sir John Hill, who, with his insolent attacks upon 
the Royal Society, pretentious botanical and medical compilations, 
plays, novels, and magazine articles, has long sunk into utter obliv- 
ion. It is said of him that he pursued every branch of literary 
quackery with greater contempt of character than any man of_ his 
time, and that he made as much as /1500 in a year : — three times 
as much, it is added, as any one writer ever made in the same 
period. 

The political scribblers— the Arnalls, Gordons, Trenchards, 
Guthries, Ralphs, and Amhersts, whose names meet us in the 
notes to the Djinciad2iXiA\vL contemporary pamphlets and news- 
papers — form another variety of the class. Their general charac- 
ter may be estimated from Johnson's classification of the " Scribbler 
for a Party " with the " Commissoner of Excise," as the "two 
lowest of all human beings." " Ralph," says one of the notes to 
the Z??^;?art^, "ended in the common sink of all such writers, a 
political newspaper." The prejudice against such employment 
has scarcely died out in our own day, and may be still traced in 
the account of Pendennis and his friend Warrington. People who 
do dirty work must Jdc paid for it ; and the Secret Committee which 
inquired into Walpole's administration reported that in ten years, 
from 1 73 1 to 1 741, a sum of ^50,077 \%s. had been paid to writers 
and printers of newspapers. Arnall, now remembered chiefly by 
Pope's line, — 

Spirit of Arnall, aid me whilst I lie ! 

had received, in four years, ^10,997 6^. %d. of this amount. The 
more successful writers might look to pensions or preferment. 
Francis, for example, the translator of Horace, and the father, in 
all probability, of the most formidable of the whole tribe of such 
literary gladiators, received, it is said, ^900 a year for his work, 
besides being appointed to a rectory and the chaplaincy of Chelsea. 
It must, moreover, be observed that the price of literary work 
wrs rising during the century, and that, in the latter half, consider- 
able sums were received by successful writers. Religious as well 
as dramatic literature had begun to be commercially valuable. 
Baxter, in the previous century, made from ^60 to £%o a year by 
his pen. The copyright of Tillotson's Serinons was sold, it is said, 
upon his death for _£25oo. Considerable sums were made by the 
plan of publishing by subscription. It is said that 4600 people 
subscribed to the two posthumous volumes of Conybeare's Ser- 
mons. A few poets trod in Pope's steps. Young made more than 
^3000 for the Satires called the Universal Passion, published, I 
think, on the same plan ; and the Duke of Wharton is said, though 



2o SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

tlie report is doubtful, to have given him ;i^ 2000 for the same work 
Gay made ^1000 by his Poems j £ifio for the copyright of the 
Bci^gars Opera, and tliree times as much for its second part, Polly. 
Among historians, Hume seems to have received ^700 a volume ; 
Smollett made ^2000 by his catchpenny rival publication; Henry 
made ^3300 by his history ; and Robertson, after the booksellers 
had made /6000 by his HeJiry of Scolland, sold his diaries V. for 
^4500. Amongst the novelists, Fielding received ^700 for Tom 
Jones and ^1000 iox Amelia; Sleni», for the second edition of the 
first part of Tristain SJiandy and lor two additional volumes, re- 
ceived ,^650; besides which Lord Fauconberg gave him a living 
(most inappropriate acknowledgment one would say!), and War- 
burton a purse of gold. Goldsmith received 60 Guineas for the 
immortal I'iear, a fair price, according to Johnson, for a work by a 
then unknown author. By each of his plays he made about ^500, 
and for the eight volumes of his Av^/z/rcr/ ///.5-/f;j he received 800 
guineas. Towards the end of the century, Mrs. Radcliffe got 
_^5oo for the Mysteries of UdolJ/io, and ^800 for her last work, 
the Italian. Perhaps the largest sum given for a single book 
was ^6000 paid to Hawkesworth for his account of the South Sea 
Expeditions. Home Tooke received from ^4000 to ^5000 for the 
Diversions of Parley ; and it is added by his biographer, though 
it seems to be incredible, that Hayley received no less than 
^i 1.000 for the Life ofCoiupcr. This was, of course, in the pres- 
ent century, when we are already approaching the period of Scott 
and Byron. 

Such sums prove that some few authors might achieve independ- 
ence by a successful work ; and it is well to remember them in con- 
sidering Johnson's life from the business point of view. Though 
he never grumbled at the booksellers, and on the contrary, was al- 
ways ready to defend them as liberal men, he certainly failed, 
whether from carelessness or want of skill, to turn them to as much 
profit as many less celebrated rivals. Meanwhile, pecuniary suc- 
cess of this kind was beyond any reasonable hopes. A mari who 
has to work like his own dependent Levett, and to make the "mod- 
est toil of every day " supply " the wants of every day," must dis- 
count his talents until he can secure leisure for some more sus- 
tained effort. Johnson, coming up from the country to seek for 
work, could have but a slender prospect of rising above the ordinary 
level of his Grub Street companions and rivals. One publisiier to 
to whom he applied suggested to him that it would be his wisest 
course to buy a porter's knot and carry trunks ; and, in the struggle 
which followed, Johnson must sometimes have been tempted to re- 
gret that the advice was not taken. 

The details of the ordeal througli wliicli he was now to pass 
have naturally vanished. Johnson, long afterwards, burst into tears 
on recalling the trials of lliis period. But, at the time, no one was 
interested in noting the history of an obscure literary drudge, and 
it has not been described by the sufferer himself. What we know 
is derived from a few letters and incidental references of Johnson 



SAMUEL JOHNSOA'. 2 I 

in later days. On fiist an-iving in London lie was almost destitute, 
and had to join with (Jarrick in raising a loan of five pounds, which 
we are glad to say, was repaid. He dined for eightpence, at an or- 
dinary: a cut of meat for sixpence, bread for a penny, and a penny 
to the waiter, making out the charge One of his acquaintance 
had told him that a man might live in London for thirty pounds a 
year. Ten pounds would pay for clothes ; a garret might be hired 
for eighteen-pence a week ; if any one asked for an address, it was 
easy to reply, " I am to be found at such a place." Threepence 
laid out at a coffee-house would enable him to pass some hours a 
day in good company : dinner might be had for sixpence, a bread- 
and-milk breakfast for a penny, and supper was superfluous. On 
clean shirt day you might go abroad and pay visits. This leaves 
a surplus of nearly one pound from the thirty. 

Johnson, however, had a wife to support ; and to raise funds for 
even so ascetic a mode of existence required steady labour. Often, 
it seems, his purse was at the ver)- lowest ebb. One of his letters 
to his employer is signed iinpranstis j and whether or not the din- 
nerless condition was in this case accidental, or significant of abso- 
lute impecuniosit}', the less pleasant interpretation is not improb- 
able. He would walk the streets all night with his friend Savage, 
when their combined funds could not pay for a lodging. One 
night, as he told Sir Joshua Reynolds in later years, they thus 
perambulated St. James's Square, warming themselves by declaim- 
ing against Walpole, and nobly resolved that they would stand by 
their country. 

Patriotic enthusiasm, however, as no one knew better than 
Johnson, is a poor substitute for bed and supper. Johnson suffered 
acutely and made some attempts to escape from his misery. To 
the end of his life, he was grateful to those who had lent him a 
helping hand. " Harry Hervey," he said of one of them shortly 
before his death, " was a vicious man, but very kind to me. If 
you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him." Pope was impressed Ijy 
the excellence of his first poem, London, and induced Lord Gower 
to write to a friend to beg Swift to obtain a degree for Johnson 
from the University of Dublin. The terms of this circuitous ap- 
plication, curious, as bringing into connexion three of the most 
eminent men of letters of the day, prove that the youngest of them 
was at the time (1739) '" deep distress. The object oi the degree 
was to qualify Johnson for a mastership of ^60 a year, v^'hich 
would make him happy for life. He would rather, said Lord 
Gower, die upon the road to Dubhn if an examination were neces- 
sary, "than be starved to death in translating for booksellers, 
which has been his only subsistence for some time past." The 
application failed, however, and the want of a degree was equally 
fatal to another application to be admitted to practise at Doctor's 
Commons. 

Literature was thus perforce Johnson's sole support; and by 
literature was meant, for the most part, drudgery of the kind 
indicated by the phrase, " translating for booksellers." While 



22 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

still in Lichfield, Johnson had, as I have said, written to Cave, 
proposing to Ijecome a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine. 
The letter was one of those which a modern editor receives by the 
dozen, and answers as perfunctorily as his conscience will allow. 
It seems, however, to have made some impression upon Cave, and 
possibly led to Johnson's employment by him on his first arrival in 
London. From 1738 he was employed both on the Magazine and 
in some jobs of translation. 

Edward Cave, to wliom we are thus introduced, was a man of 
some mark in the liistory of literature. Johnson always spoke of 
him with affection and afterwards wrote his life in complimentary 
terms. Cave, though a clumsy, phlegmatic person of little cultiva- 
tion, seems to have been one of those men who, whilst destitute of 
real critical powers, have a certain instinct for recognising the com- 
mercial value of literary wares. He had become by this time well- 
known as the publisher of a magazine which survives to this day. 
Journals containing summaries of passing events had already been 
started. 'Qoyefs Political State of Great Britain began in 1711. 
The Historical Register, which added to a clironicle some literary 
notices, was started in 1716. The Grub Street Jojirnal was an- 
other journal with fuller critical notices, which first appeared in 
1730; and these two seem to have been superseded by the Gentle- 
man^s Magazine, started by Cave in the next year. Johnson saw 
in it an opening for the employment of his literary talents ; and 
regarded its contributions with that awe so natural in youthful 
aspirants, and at once so comic and pathetic to writers of a little ex- 
perience. The names of many of Cave's staff are preserved in a 
note to Hawkins. One or two of them, such as Birch and Aken- 
side, have still a certain -interest for students of literature ; but 
few have heard of the great Moses Brown, who was regarded as 
the great poetical liglit of the magazine. Johnson looked up to 
him as a leader in his craft, and was graciously taken by Cave to 
an alehouse in Clerkenwell, where, wrapped in a horseman's coat, 
and " a great bushy uncombed wig," he saw Mr. Brown sitting at- 
the end of a long table, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, and felt the 
satisfaction of a true hero-worshipper. 

It is needless to descril)e in detail the literary task-work done 
by Johnson at this period, the Latin poems which he contributed 
in praise of Cave, and of Cave's friends, or the Jacobite squibs by 
which he relieved his anti-ministerialist feelings. One incident of 
the period doubtless refreshed the soul of many authors, who have 
shared Campbell's gratitude to Naoo'eon for the sole redeeming 
action of his life— the shooting of a bo kseller. Johnson was em- 
ployed i-)y Osborne, jf rough specimen mI tlie trade, to make a cata- 
logue of tlic Harleian Library. Osborne offensively reproved him 
for negligence, and Johnson knocked him down with a folio. The 
book witii which tlie feat was performed {Biblia Grceca Septuaginta, 
fol. 1594, Frankfort) was in existence in a bookseller's shop at 
Cambridge in 1812, and should surely have been placed in some 
safe author's museum. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 23 

The most remarkable of Johnson's performances as a hack- 
writer deserves a brief notice. He was one of the first of reporters. 
Cave pubHshed sucli reports of the debates in Parliament as were 
then allowed by the jealousy of the Legislature, under the title of 
The Senate of Lilliput. Johnson was the author of the debates 
from Nov. 174010 February 1742. Persons were employed to 
attend in the two Houses, who brought home notes of the speeches, 
which were then put into shape by Johnson. Long afterwards, at a 
dinner at Foote's, Francis (the father of Junius) mentioned a speech 
of Pitt's as the best he had ever read, and superior to anything in 
Demosthenes. Hereupon Johnson replied, " I wrote that speech in 
a garret in Exeter Street." When the company applauded not only 
his eloquence but his impartiality, Johnson replied, "That is not 
quite true ; I saved appearances tolerably well, but 1 took care that 
the Whig dogs should not have the best of it." The speeches 
passed for a time as accurate ; though, in truth, it has been proved 
and it is easy to observe, that they are, in fact, very vague reflections 
of the original. The editors of Chesterfield's Works published two 
of the speeches, and, to Johnson's considerable amusement, declared 
that one of them resembled Demosthenes and the other Cicero. 
It is plain enough to the modern reader that, if so, both of .the 
ancient orators must have written true Johnsonese ; and, in fact, 
the style of the true author is often as plainly marked in many of 
these compositions as in the Rambler or Rasselas. For this decejy 
tion, such as it was, Johnson expressed penitence at the end of his 
life, though he said that he had ceased to write when he found 
that they were taken as genuine. He would not be " accessory to 
the propagation of falsehood." 

Another of Johnson's works which appeared in 1744 requires 
notice both for its intrinsic merit, and its autobiographical interest. 
The most remarkable of his Grub-Street companions was the 
Richai"d Savage alread)' mentioned. Johnson's life of him written 
soon after his death is one of his most forcible performances, and 
the best extant illustration of the life of the strugglijig authors of 
the time. Savage claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Coun- 
tess of Macclesfield, wlio was divorced from her husband in the 
year of his birth on account of her connexion with his supposed 
father. Lord Rivers. According to the story, believed by Johnson, 
and published without her contradiction in the mother's lifetime, 
she not only disavowed her son, but cherished an unnatural 
hatred for him. She told his father that he was dead, in order 
that he might not be benefited by the father's will ; she tried to 
have him kidnapped and sent to the plantations ; and she did her 
best to prevent him from receiving a pardon when he had been 
sentenced to death for killing a man in a tavern brawl. However 
this may be, and there are reasons for doubt, the story was 
generally believed, and caused much sympathy for the supposed 
victim. Savage was at one time protected by the kindness of 
Steele, who published his story, and sometimes employed him as a 
literary assistant. When Steele became disgusted with him, he 



24 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

received generous help from the actor Wilks and from Mrs. Old- 
field, to whom he had been introduced by some dramatic efforts. 
Then he was taken up by Lord Tyrconnel, but abandoned by him 
after a violent quarrel ; he afterwards called himself a volunteer 
laureate, and received a pension of 50/. a year from Queen Caroline ; 
on her death he was thrown into deep distress, and helped by a 
subscription to which Pope was tiie chief contributor, on condition 
of retiring to the country. Ultimately he quarrelled with his last 
protectors, and ended by dying in a debtor's prison. Various 
poetical works, now utterly forgotten, obtained for him scanty 
profit. This career sufficiently reveals the character. 'Savage 
belonged to the very common type of men, who seem to employ 
their whole talents to throw away their chances in life, and to 
disgust every one who offers them a helping hand. He was, how- 
ever, a man of some talent, though his poems are now hopelessly 
unreadable, and seems to have had a singular attraction for 
Johnson. The biography is curiously marked by Johnson's con- 
stant effort to put the best face upon faults, which he has too much 
love of truth to conceal. The explanation is, partly, that Johnson 
conceived himself to be avenging a victim of cruel oppression. 
" This mother," he says, after recording her vindictiveness, " is 
still alive, and may perhaps even yet, though her malice was often 
defeated, enjoy the pleasure of reflecting that the life, which she 
often endeavoured to destroy, was at last shortened by her mater- 
nal offices ; that though she could not transport her son to the 
plantations, bury him in the shop of a mechanic, or hasten the 
hand of the public executioner, she has yet had the satisfaction of 
embittering all his hours, and forcing him into exigencies that 
hurried on his death." 

But it is also probable that Savage had a strong influence upon 
Johnson's mind at a very impressible part of his career. The 
young man, still ignorant of life and full of reverent enthusiasm for 
the literary magnates of his time, was impressed by the varied e.x- 
perience of his companion, and, it may be, flattered by his intimacy. 
Savage, he says admiringly, had enjoyed great op])ortunities of see- 
ing the most conspicuous men of the day in their private life. He 
was shrewd and inquisitive enough to use his opportunities well. 
" More circumstances to constitute a critic on human life could 
not easily concur." The only phrase which survives to justify 
this remark is Savage's statement about Walpole, that " the whole 
range of his mind was from obscenity to politics, and from politics 
to obscenity." We may, however, guess what was the special 
charm of the intercourse to Johnson. Savagewas an expert in that 
science of human nature, learnt from experience not from books, 
upon which Johnson set so high a value, and of which he was 
destined to become the authorised expositor. There were, more- 
over resemblances between the two men. They were both admired 
and sought out for their conversational powers. Savage, indeed, 
seems to have lived chiefly by the people who entertained him for 
talk, till he had disgusted them by his insolence and his utter disre- 



SAMUEL jOHNSO^r, 25 

gard of time and propriety. He would, like Johnson, sit up talking 
beyond midnight, and next day decline to rise till dinner-time, 
though his favourite drink was not, like Johnson's, free from intoxi- 
cating properties. Both of them had a lofty pride, which Johnson 
heartily commends in Savage, though he has difficulty in pallia- 
ting some of its manifestations. One of the stories reminds us of 
an anecdote already related of Johnson himself. Some clothes 
had been left for Savage at a coffee-house byaperson who, out of 
delicacy, cor.ccaled his name. Savage, however, resented some 
want of ceremony, and refused to enter the house again till the 
clothes had been removed. 

What was honourable pride in Johnson was, indeed, simple 
arrogance in Savage. He asked favours, his biographer says, with- 
out submission, and resented refusal as an insult. He had too 
much pride to acknowledge, not too much to receive, obligations ; 
enough to quarrel with his charitable benefactors, but not enough to 
make him rise to independence of their charity. His pension would 
have sufficed to keep him, only that as soon as he received it he re- 
tired from the sight of all his acquaintance, and came back before 
long as penniless as before. This conduct, observes his biographer, 
was " very particular." It was hardly so singular as objectionable ; 
and we are not surprised to be told that he was rather a " friend of 
goodness " tiian himself a good man. In short, we may say of 
.him as Beauclerk said of a friend of Boswell's that, if he had ex- 
cellent principles, he did not wearthem out in practice. 

There is something quaint about this picture of a thorough- 
paced scamp, admiringly painted by a virtuous man ; forced in spite 
of himself, to niake it a likeness, and striving in vain to make it 
attractive. But it is also pathetic when we remember that Johnson 
shared some part at least of liis hero's miseries. " On a bulk, in 
a cellar, or in a glass-house, among thieves and beggars, was to be 
found the author of The IVanderer, the man of exalted sentiments, 
extensive views, and curious observations ; the man whose remarks 
on life might have assisted the statesman, whose ideas of virtue 
might have enlightened the moralist, whose eloquence might have 
influenced senators, and whose delicacy might have polished 
courts." Very shocking, no doubt, and yet hardly surprising m> 
der the circumstances ! To us it is more interesting to remember 
that the author of the Rambler was not only a sympathiser, but a 
fellow-sufferer with the author of the Wanderer, and shared the 
queer " lodgings " of his friend, as Floyd shared the lodgings of Der- 
rick. Johnson happily came unscathed through the ordeal which was 
too much for poor Savage, and could boast with perfect truth in later 
life that " no man, who ever lived by literature, had lived more in- 
dependently than I have done." It was in so strange a school, 
and under such questionable teaching that Johnson formed his 
character of the world and of the conduct befitting its inmates. 
One characteristic conclusion is indicated in the opening passage 
of tlie life. It has always been observed, he says, that men 
eminent by nature or fortune are not generally happy : " whether 



26 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great 
designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages ; or tliat the general 
lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those, whose 
eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more 
carefully recorded because tliey were more generally observed, and 
have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, 
not more frequent or more severe." 

The last explanation was that which really commended itself to 
Johnson. Nobody had better reason to know that obscurity might 
conceal a misery as bitter as any that fell to the lot of the most 
eminent. The gloom due to his constitutional temperament was 
intensified by the sense that he and his wife were dependent upon 
the good will of a narrow and ignorant tradesman for the scantiest 
maintenance. How was he to reach some solid standing-ground 
above the hopeless mire of Grub Street ? As a journeyman author 
he could make both ends meet, but only on condition of incessant 
labour. Illness and misfortune would mean constant dependence 
upon charity or bondage to creditors. To get ahead of the world 
it was necessary to distinguish himself in some way from the herd 
of needy competitors. He had come up from Lichfield with a 
play in his pocket, but the play did not seem at present to have 
much chance of emerging. Meanwhile he published a poem which 
did something to give him a general reputation. 

London — an imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal — was pub- 
lished in May, 1738. The plan was doubtless suggested by Pope's 
imitations of Horace, which had recently appeared. Though neces- 
sarily following the lines of Juvenal's poem, and conforming to the 
conventional fashion of the time, both in sentiment and versifica- 
tion, the poem has a biographical significance. It is indeed odd to 
find Johnson, who afterwards thought of London as a lover of his 
mistress, and who despised nothing more heartily than the cant of 
Rousseau and the sentimentalists, adopting in this poem the ordi- 
nary denunciations of the corruption of towns, and singing the praises 
of an innocent country life. Doubtless, the young writer was like 
other young men, taking up a strain still imitative and artificial. He 
has a quiet smile at Savage in the life, because in his retreat to Wales, 
that enthusiast declared that he " could not debar himself from the 
happiness which was to be found in the calm of a cottage, or lose 
the opportunity of listening without intermission to the melody of 
the nightingale, which he believed was to be heard from every 
bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important 
part of the happiness of a country life." In London, this insincere 
cockney adopts Savage's view. Thales, who is generally supposed 
to represent Savage (and this coincidence seems to confirm the 
opinion), is to retire "from the dungeons of the Strand," and to end 
a healthy life in pruning walks and twining bowers in his garden. 

There every bush with nature's music rings, 
There every breeze bears health upon its wings. 

Johnson had not yet learnt the value of perfect sincerity even in 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 37 

poetry. But it must also be admitted that London, as seen by the 
poor drudge from a Grub Street garret, probably presented a pros- 
pect gloomy enough to make even Johnson long at times for rural 
solitude. The poem reflects, too, the ordinary talk of the hetero- 
geneous band of patriots, Jacobites, and disappointed Whigs, who 
were beginning to gather enough strength to threaten Walpole's 
long tenure of power. Many references to contemporary politics 
illustrate Johnson's sympathy with the inhabitants of the contem- 
porary Cave of Adullam. 

This poem, as already stated, attracted Pope's notice, who made 
a curious note on a scrap of paper sent with it to a friend. John- 
son is described as " a man afflicted with an infirmity of the convul- 
sive kind, that attacks him sometimes so as to make him a sad 
spectacle." This seems to have been the chief information obtained 
by Pope about the anonymous author, of whom he had said, on first 
reading the poem, this man will soon be deterr^. London made a 
certain noise ; it reached a second edition in a week, and attracted 
various patrons, among others, General Oglethorpe, celebrated by 
Pope, and through a long hfe the warm friend of Johnson. One line, 
however, in the poem printed in capital letters, gives the moral 
which was doubtless most deeply felt by the author, and which did 
not lose its meaning in the years to come. This mournful truth, 
he says, — 

Is everywhere confess'd, 
Slow rises worth by poverty depress'd. 

Ten years later (in January, 1749) appeared the Vanity of Human 
Wishes^ an imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. The differ- 
ence in tone shows how deeply this and similar truths had been 
impressed upon its author in the interval. Though still an imita- 
tion, it is as significant as the most original work could be of John- 
son's settled views of life. It was written at a white heat, as indeed 
Johnson wrote all his best work. Its strong Stoical morality, its 
profound and melancholy illustrations of the old and ever new sen- 
timent, Vanitas Vaiiitatuju, make it perhaps the most impressive 
poem of the kind in the language. The lines on the scholar's fate 
show that the iron had entered his soul in the interval. Should 
the scholar succeed beyond expectation in his labours and escape 
melancholy and disease, yet, he says, — 

Yet hope hot life from grief and danger free, 
Nor think the doom of man reversed on thee ; 
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes 
And pause awhile from letters, to be wise ; 
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, 
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail ; 
See nations, slowly wise and meanly just, 
To buried merit raise the tardy bust. 
If dreams yet flatter, once again attend. 
Hear Lydiat's life and Galileo's end. 



^8 SAMUEL joimsoN: 

For the " patron," Johnson had originally written the " garret," 
The change was made after an experience of patronage to be pres- 
ently described in connexion with the Dictio7iary. 

For Lflvdon Johnson received ten guineas, and for the Vanity 
of Human Wishes fifteen. Though indirectly valuable, as increas- 
ing his reputation, such work was' not very profitable. The most 
promising career in a pecuniary sense was still to be found on the 
.stao-e. Novelists were not yet the rivals of dra«matists, and many 
authors had made enough by a successful play to lloat them through 
a year or two. Johnson had probably been determined by his 
knowledge of this fact to write the tragedy of Irene. No otherex- 
cusc at least can be given for the composition of one of the heaviest 
and most unreadable of dramatic performances, interesting now, if 
interesting at all, solely as a curious example of the result of be- 
stowing great powers upon a totally uncongenial task. Young 
men, however, may be pardoned for such blunders if they are not 
repeated, and Johnson, though he seems to have retained a fond- 
ness for his unlucky performance, never indulged in playwriting 
after leaving Lichfield. The best thing connected with the play 
was Johnson's retort to his friend Walmsley, the Liclifield registrar. 
" How," asked Walmsley, "can you contrive to plunge your hero- 
ine into deeper calamity ? " " Sir," said Jolinson, " I can put her 
into the spiritual court." Even Boswell can only say for Irene that 
it is "entitled to the praise of superior excellence," and admits its 
entire absence of dramatic power. Garrick, who had become man- 
ager of Drury Lane, produced his friend's work in 1749. '^'''^ P'^Y 
was carried through nine nights by Garrick's friendly zeal, so that 
the author had his three nights' profits. For this he received ^195 
1 7J-. and for the copy he had_j^ioo. People probably attended, as 
they attend modern representations of legitimate drama, rather from 
a sense of dut\-, than in the hope of pleasure. The heroine origi- 
nally had to sp.ak two lines with a bowstring round her neck. The 
situation produced cries of murder, and she had to go off the stage 
alive. The objectional^le passage was removed, but Irene was on 
the whole a failure, and lias never, I imagine, made another appear- 
ance. When asked how he felt upon his ill-success, he replied 
" like the monument," and indeed he made it a principle throughout 
life to accept the decision of the public like a sensible man without 
murmurs. 

Meanwhile, Johnson was already embarked upon an undertaking 
of a very different kind. In 1747 he had put forth a plan for an 
English Dictionary, addressed at the suggestion of Dodslgy, to 
Lord Chesterfield, then Secretary of State, and the great contem- 
porary Maecenas. Johnson had apparently been maturing the 
scheme for some time. "I know," he says in the "plan," that 
"the work in which I engaged is generally considered as drudgery 
for tlie blind, as the proper toil of artless industry, a book that re- 
quires neither the light of learning nor the activity of genius, but 
may be successfully performed without any higher quality than that 
of bearing burdens with dull patience, and beating the track of the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 29 

alphabet with sluggish resolution." He adds in a sub-sarcastic 
tone, that although princes and statesmen had once thought it hon- 
ourable to patronise dictionaries, he had considered such benevo- 
lent acts to be " prodigies, recorded rather to raise wonder than 
expectation," and he was accordingly pleased and surprised to find 
that Chesterfield took an interest in his undertaking. He proceeds 
to lay down the general principles upon which he intends to frame 
his work, in order to invite timely suggestions and repress unrea- 
sonable expectations. At this time, humble as his aspirations 
might be, he took a view of the possibilities open to him which 
had to be lowered before the publication of the dictionary. He 
shared tlie illusion that a language might be " fixed " by making a 
catalogue of its words. In the preface which appeared with the 
completed work, he explains very sensibly the vanity of any such 
expectation. Whilst all human affairs are changing, it is, as he 
says, absurd to imagine thtvt the language which repeats all human 
thoughts and feelings can remain unaltered. 

A dictionary, as Johnson conceived it, was in fact work for a 
"harmless drudge," the definition of a lexicographer given in the 
book itself. Etymology in a scientific sense was as yet non-exist- 
ent, and Johnson was not in this respect ahead of his contempo- 
raries. To collect all the words in the language, to define their 
meanings as accurately as might be, to give the obvious or whim- 
sical guesses at Etymology suggested by previous writers, and to 
append a good collection of illustrative passages was the sum of 
his ambition. Any systematic training of the historical processes 
by which a particular language had been developed was unknown, 
and of course the result could not be anticipated. The work, in- 
deed, required a keen logical faculty of definition, and wide read- 
ing of the English literature of the two preceding centuries ; but 
it could of course give- no play either for the- higher literary facul- 
ties on points of scientific investigation. A dictionary in Johnson's 
sense was the highest kind of work to which a literary journeyman 
could be set, but it was still work for a journeyman, not for an 
artist. He was not adding to literature, but providing a useful^m- 
plement for future men of letters. 

Johnson had thus got on hand the biggest job that could be 
well undertaken by a good workman in his humble craft. He was 
to receive fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds for the whole, 
and he expected to finish it in three years. The money, it is to be 
'observed, was to satisfy not only Johnson but several copyists em- 
ployed in the mechanical part of the work. It was advanced by 
instalments, and came to an end before the conclusion of the book. 
Indeed, it appeared when accounts were settled, that he had re- 
ceived a hundred pounds more than was due. He could, however, 
pay his way for the time, and would gain a reputation enough to 
ensure work in future. The period of extreme poverty had prob- 
ably ended when Johnson got permanent employment on the 
Gcntleinaji's Magazine. He was not elevated above the need of 
drudgery and ecoriomy, but he might at least be free from the 



3© SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

dread of neglect. He could command his. market — such as it was. 
The necessity of steady labour was probably unfelt in repelling his 
fits of melancholy. His name was beginning to be known, and 
men of reputation were seeking his acquaintance. In the winter 
of 1749 1^^ formed a club, which met weekly at a "famous beef- 
steak house " in Ivy Lane. Among its members were Hawkins, 
afterwards his biographer, and two friends, Bathurst a physician, 
and Hawkesworth an author, for the first of whom he entertained 
an unusually strong affection. The Club, like its more famous suc- 
cessor, gave Johnson an opportunity of displaying and improving 
his great conversational powers. He was already dreaded for his 
prowess in argument, his dictatorial manners and vivid flashes of 
wit and humour, the more effective from the habitual gloom and 
apparent heaviness of the discourser. 

The talk of this society probably suggested topics for the Rafft- 
bier, which appeared at this time, and caused Johnson's fame to 
spread further beyond the literary circles of London. The wit 
and humour have, indeed, left few traces upon its ponderous pages, 
for the Rambler marks the culminating period of Johnson's worst 
qualities of style. The pompous and involved language seems in- 
deed to be a fit clothing for the melancholy reflections which are 
its chief staple, and in spite of its unmistakable power it is as heavy 
reading as the heavy class of lay-sermonizing to which it belongs. 
Such literature, however, is often strangely popular in England, 
and the Ratfibler, though its circulation was limited, gave to John- 
son his position as a great practical moralist. He took his literary 
title, one may say, from the Rambler, as the more familiar title was 
derived from the Dictionary. 

The Rambler was published twice a week from March 20th, 
1750, to March 14th, 1752. In five numbers alone he received as- 
sistance from friends, and one of these, written by Richardson, is 
said to have been the only number which had a large sale. The 
circulation rarely exceeded 500, though ten English editions were 
published in the author's lifetime, besides Scotch and Irish editions. 
The payment, however, namely, two guineas a number, must have 
been welcome to Johnson, and tlie friendship of many distinguished 
men of the time was a still more valuable reward. A quaint story 
illustrates the hero-worship of which Johnson now became the ob- 
ject. Dr. Burney, afterwards an intimate friend, had introduced 
himself to Johnson by letter in consequence of the Rambler, and 
the plan of the Dictionary . The admiration was shared by a friend 
of Burney's, a Mr. Bewley, known — in Norfolk at least — as the 
"philosopher of Massingham." When Burney at last gained the- 
honour of a personal interview, he wished to procure some " relic " 
of Johnson for his friend. He cut off some bristles from a hearth- 
broom in the doctor's chambers, and sent them in a letter to his 
fellow-enthusiast. Long afterwards Johnson was pleased to hear 
of this simple-minded homage, and not only sent a copy of the 
Lives of the Poets to the rural philosopher, but deigned to grant 
him a personal interview. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 31 

Dearer than any such praise was the approval of Johnson's 
wife. She told him that, well as she had thought of him before, 
she had not considered him equal to such a performance. The 
voice that so charmed him was soon to be silenced forever. Mrs. 
Johnson died (March 17th, 1752) three days after the appearance 
of the last Rambler. The man who has passed through such a 
trial knows well that, whatever may be in store for him in the dark 
future, fate can have no heavier blow in reserve. Though John- 
son once acknowledged to Boswell, when in a placid humour, that 
happier days had come to him in his old age than in his early life, 
he would probably have added that though fame and friendship 
and freedom from the harrowing cares of poverty might cause his 
life to be more equably happy, yet their rewards could represent 
but a faint and mocking reflection of the best moments of a happy 
marriage. His strong mind and tender nature reeled under the 
blow. Here is one pathetic little note written to the friend. Dr. 
Taylor, who had come to him in his distress. That wliich first 
announced the calamity, and which, said Taylor, " expressed grief 
in the strongest manner he had ever read," is lost. 

" Dear Sir,— Let me have your company and instruction. Do 
not live away from me. My distress is great. 

"Pray desire Mrs. Taylor to inform me what mourning I 
should buy for my mother and Miss Porter, and bring a note in 
writing with you. 

" Remember me in your prayers, for vain is the help of man. 

" I am, dear sir, 

" Sam. Johnson." 

We need not regret that a veil is drawn over the details of the 
bitter agony of his passage .through the valley of the shadow of 
death. It is enough to put down the wails which he wrote long 
afterwards when v sibly approaching the close of all human emo- 
tions and interests : — 

"This is the day on which, in 1752, dear Letty died. I have 
now uttered a prayer of repentance and contrition ; perhaps Letty 
knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Letty is now praying for 
me. God help me. Thou, God, art merciful, hear my prayers and 
enable me to trust in Thee. 

" We were married almost seventeen years, and have now been 
parted thirty." 

It seems half profane, even at this distance of time, to. pry 
into grief so deep and so lasting. Johnson turned for relief to 
that which all sufferers know to be the only remedy for sorrow — 
hard labour. He set to work in his garret, an inconvenient room, 
" because," he said, " in that room only I never saw Mrs. John- 
son." He helped liis friend Hawkesworth in the Adventurer, 
a ne\y periodical of the Rambler kind; but his main work was the 
Dictionary, which came out at last in 1755. Its appearance was 
the occasion of an explosion of wrath whicli marks an epoch in 
our literature. Johnsoii, as we have seen, had dedicated the Plan 



32 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

to Lord Cliesterficld ; and his language implies that the)' had been 
to some extent in personal communication. Chestertield's fame is 
in curious antithesis to Johnson's. He was a man of great abili- 
ties, and seems to have deserved high credit for some parts of his 
statesmanship. As a Viceroy in Ireland in particular he showed 
qualities rare in his generation. To Johnson he was known as the 
nobleman who had a wide social influence as an acknowledged 
arbiter ekganiiaruin, and who reckoned among his claims some 
of that literary polish in which the earlier generation of nobles had 
certainly been superior to their successors. The art of life ex- 
pounded in his Letters differs from Johnson as much as the 
elegant diplomatist differs from the rough intellectual gladiator of 
Grub Street. Johnson spoke his mind of his rival without reserve. 
"I thought," he said, "that this man had been a Lord among 
wits ; but I find he is only a wit among Lords." And of the Let- 
ters he said more keenly that they taught the morals of a harlot 
and the manners of a dancing-master. Chesterfield's opinion of 
Johnson is indicated by the description in hia L-Jtters oi a "re- 
spectable Hottentot, who throws his meat anywhere but down his 
throat. This absurd person," said Chesterfield, " was not only 
uncouth in manners and warm in dispute, but behaved exactly in 
the same way to superiors, equals, and inferiors ; and there;fore, by 
a necessary consequence, absurdly to two of the three. ///;/f ///ce 
lacryjHCE .'' " 

Johnson, in my opinion, was not far wrong in his judgment, 
though it would be a gross injustice to regard Chesterfield as noth- 
ing but a friljble. But men representing two such antithetic types 
were not likely to admire each other's good qualities. Whatever 
had been the intercourse between them. Johnson was naturally an- 
noyed when the dignified noble published two articles in the 
World — a periodical supported by such polite personages as him- 
self and Horace Walpole — in which the need of a dictionary was 
set forth, and various courtly compliments described Johnson's 
fitness for a dictatorship over the language. Nothing" could be 
more prettily turned ; but it meant, and Johnson took'it to nuan, 
I should like to have the dictionary dedicated to me : such a com- 
pliment would add a feather to my cap, and enable me to appear to 
the world as a patron of literature as well as an authoritv upon 
manners. "After making great professions," as Johnson said, 
"he had, for many years, taken no notice of me ; but when mv 
DutLOHary was coming out, he fell a scribbling in the World 
about it."^ Johnson therefore bestowed upon the noble earl a 
piece of his mind in a letter which was not published till it came 
out in Boswell's biography. 

" My Lord, — I have been lately informed by the proi^rietor of 
the World that two papers, in which my Dictionarv is fecom- 
rnended to the public, were written by your lordship. To be so 
distinguished is an honour which, being very little accustomed to 
favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what 
terms to acknowledge. 



SAMUEL JO/LVSON: ^3 

" When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your 
Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the 
enchantment of your address ; and could not forbear to wish that 
I might boast myself, Ic vai/iqneu?- dii vai)iqucur de la U-rre— that 
I might obtain that regard for which 1 saw the world contending ; 
but 1 found my attendance so little encouraged tlfet neither pride 
nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once 
addressed your Lordship in public, I had exhausted' all the arts 
of pleasing which a wearied and uncourtly scholar can possess. 
] had done all that I could ; and no man is well pleased to have 
his all neglected, be it ever so little. 

" Seven years, my lord, have now passed, since I waited in your 
outward rooms and was repulsed from your door ; during which 
time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which 
it is usejess to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of 
publication without one act of assistance, one word of encourage- 
ment, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for 
I never had a patron before. 

"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and 
found him a native of the rocks. 

•' Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a 
man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached the 
ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have 
been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been 
kind ; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy 
it ; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it ; till I am known, and 
do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess 
obligations where no benefit had been received, or to be unwilling 
that the public should consider, me as owing that to a patron which 
Providence has enabled me to do for myself. 

" Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation 
to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I 
should conclude it, should less be possible, with less ; for I have 
been long wakened from that dream of hope in which I once boast- 
ed myself with so much exultation, my Lord, 

"Your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, 

" Sam Johnson." 

The letter is one of those knock-down blows to which no an- 
swer is possible, and upon which comment is superfluous. It was, 
as Mr. Carlvle calls it, " the far-famed blast of doom proclaiming 
into the ear'of Lord Chesterfield and through him, of the listening 
world, that patronage should be no more." 

That is all that can be said ; yet perhaps it should be added that 
Johnson remarked that he had once received /ro from Chesterfield, 
though he thought the assistance too inconsiderable to lie mentioned 
in such a letter. Hawkins also states that Chesterfield sent over- 
tures to Johnson through two friends, one of whom, long Sir 
Thomas Robinson, stated that, if he were rich enough (a judicious 
clause) he would himself settle ^500 year upon Johnson. Johnson 
replied that if the first peer of the realm made such an offer, he 



34 SAMUEL lOIlNSON. 

would show him the way downstairs. Hawkins is startled at this 
insolence, and at Johnson's nniform assertion that "an offer of 
money was an insult. We cannot tell what was the Iiistory of the 
/lo; but Johnson, in spite of Hawkins's righteous indignation, was 
in fact too proud to be a bcLrgar, and owed to his pride his escape 
from the fate of Savage. 

The appearance of tlie DittioiuDy placed Johnson in the posi- 
tion described soon afterwards by Smollett. He was henceforth 
" the great Cham of Literature " — a monarch sitting in the chair 
previously occupied by his namesake, Ben, by Dryden, and by 
Pope ; but which has since that time been vacant. The world of 
literature has become too large for such authority. Complaints 
were not seldom uttered at the time. Goldsmith has urged that 
Boswell wished to make a monarchy of what ought to be a repub- 
lic. Goldsmith, who would have been the last man to find serious 
fault with ' the dictator, thought the dictatorship objectionable. 
Some time indeed was still to elapse before we can say that John- 
son was firmly seated on the throne ; but the Dictionary and the 
Ra/tiblcr had given him a position not altogether easy to appreci- 
ate, now that tlie Dictionary has been superseded and the Rambler 
gone out of fasliion. His name was the highest at this time (1755) 
in the ranks of pure literature. The fame of Warburton possibly 
bulked larger for the moment, and one of his flatterers was com- 
paring- him to the Colossus wliich bestrides the petty world of con- 
temporaries. But Warburton had subsided into episcopal -repose, 
and literature had been for him a stepping-stone rather tlian an 
ultimate aim. Hume had written works of far more enduring in- 
fluence than Johnson ; but they were little read though generally 
abused, and scarcely belong to the purely literary history. The 
first volume of his History of England \\3.6. appeared (1754), but 
had not succeeded. The second was just coming out. Richard- 
son was still giving laws to his little seraglio of adoring women ; 
Fielding Jiad died (1754), worn out by labour and dissipation; 
Smollett was active in the literary trade, but not in such a way as 
to increase his own dignity or that of his employment; Gray was 
slowly writing a few lines of exquisite verse in his retirement at 
Cambridge ; two young Irish adventurers, Burke and Goldsmith, 
were just coming to London to try their fortune ; Adam Smith 
made his first experiment as an author by reviewing the Diction- 
ary in the Edinburgh Review; Robcrston liad not yet ap])eared 
as a historian ; Gibbon was at Lausanne repenting of his old brief 
lapse into Catholicism as an act of undergraduate's folly; and 
Cowper, after three years of "giggling and making giggle " with 
Thurlow in an attorney's office, was now entered at the Temple 
and amusing himself at times with literature in company with such 
small men of letters as Colman, Bonnell Thornton, and Lloyd. It 
was a slack tide of literature ; the generation of Pope had passed 
away and left no successors, and no writer of the time could be 
put in competition with the giant now known as " Dictionary 
Johnson." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 35 

When the last sheet of the Dictionary had been carried to the 
publisher, Millar, Johnson asked the messenger, "What did he 
say?" "Sir," said the messenger, "he said, 'Thank God 1 have 
done with him.' " " I am glad," replied Johnson, "that he thanks 
God for anything." Thankfulness for relief from seven years' 
toil seems to have been Johnson's predominant feeling : and he 
was not anxious for a time to take any new labours upon his shoul- 
ders. Some vears passed which have left few traces either upon 
his personal or his literary history. He contributed a good many 
reviews in 1756-7 to the Literary Magazine, one of which, a re- 
view of Soame Jenyns, is amongst his best performances. To a 
weekly paper he contributed for two years, from April, 1758, to 
April, 1 760, a set of essays called the Idler, on the' old Rambler 
plan. He did some small literary cobbler's work, receiving a 
guinea for a prospectus to a newspaper and ten pounds for cor- 
recting a volume of poetry. He had advertised in 1756 a new 
edition of Sliakspeare which was to a])pear by Christmas, 1757: 
but he dawdled over it so unconscional)ly that it did not appear 
for nine years; and then only in conf.ecpience of taunts from 
Churchill, who accused him with too much plausibility of cheating 
his subscribers. 

He for subscribers baits his hook ; 

And takes your cash ; but where's the book ? 

No matter where ; wise fear, you know 

Forbids the robbing of a foe ; 

But what to serve our private ends 

Forbids the cheating of our friends .' 

In truth, his constitutional indolence seems to have gained ad- 
vantages over him, when the stimulus of a heavy task was removed. 
In his meditations, there are many^complaints of his '• sluggishness " 
and resolutions of amendment. " A kind of strange oblivion^as 
spread over me." he says in April, 1764, " so that I know not what 
has become of the last years, and perceive that incidents and intelli- 
gence pass over me without leaving any impression." 

It seems, however, that he was still frequently in difficulties. 
Letters are preserved showing that in the beginning of 1756, Rich- 
ardson became surety for him for a debt, and lent him six guineas 
to release him from arrest. An event which happened three years 
later illustrates his position and character. In January, 1759, his 
mother died at the age of ninety, Johnson was unable to come to 
Liclifield, and some deeply pathetic letters to her and her step- 
daughter, who lived with her, record his emotions. Here is tlie 
last sad farewell upon the snapping of the most sacred of human 
ties. 

" Dear Honoured Mother," he says in a letter enclosed to Lucy 
Porter, the step-daughter, "neither your condition nor your charac- 
ter make it fit for me to say much. You have been the best mother, 
aad I believe the best woman in the world. 1 thank vou for \'Our 



36 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

indulgence to me, and beg forgiveness of all that I have done ill, 
and all that I have omitted to do well. God grant you His Holy 
Spirit, and receive you to everlasting happiness for jesus Christ's 
sake. Amen. Lord Jesus receive your spirit. 1 am, dear, dear 
motlier, 

"Your dutiful son, 

" Samuel Johnson.' 

Johnson managed to raise twelve guineas, six of them borrowed 
from his printer, to send to his dying mother. In order to gain 
money for her funeral expenses and some small debts, he wrote the 
story of Rasselas. It was composed in the evenings of a single 
week, and sent to press as it was written. He received ^loo for 
this, perhaps the most successful of his minor writings, and ^25 
for a second edition. It was widely translated and universally ad- 
mired. One of the strangest of literary coincidences is the con- 
temporary appearance of this work and Voltaire's Cmidide j to 
which, indeed, it bears in some respects so strong a resemblance 
that, but for Johnson's apparent contradiction, we would suppose 
that he had at least heard some description of its design. The two 
stories, though widely differing in tone and st3'le, are among the 
most powerful expressions of the melancholy produced in strong 
intellects by the sadness and sorrows of the world. The literary 
excellence of Candide has secured for it a wider and more enduring 
popularity than has fallen to the lot of Johnson's far heavier pro- 
duction. But Rasselas is a book of singular force, and bears the 
most characteristic impression of Johnson's peculiar temperament. 

A great change was approaching in Johnson's circumstances. 
When George III. came to the throne, it struck some of his ad- 
visers that it would be well, as Boswell puts it, to open " a new and 
brighter prospect to men of literary merit." This commendable 
design was carried out by offering to Johnson a pension of three 
hundred a year. Considering that such men as Horace Walpole 
and his like were enjoying sinecures of more than twice as many 
thousands for being their father's sons, the bounty does not strike 
one as excessively liberal. It seems to have been really intended 
as some set-off against otlier pensions bestowed upon various 
hangers-on of the Scotch prime minister, Bute. Johnson was 
coupled with the contemptible scribbler, Shebbeare, who had lately 
been in the pillory for a Jacobite libel (a "he-bear" and a "she- 
bear," said tlie facetious newspapers), and when a few months 
afterwards a pension of ^200 a year was given to the old actor, 
Sheridan, Jolinson growled out that it was time for him to resign 
his own. Somebody kindly repeated the remark to Sheridan, who 
would never afterwards speak to Johnson. 

The pension, though very welcome to Johnson, who seems to 
have been in real distress at the time, suggested some difficulty. 
Johnson had unluckily spoken of a pension in his Dictionary as 
"generally understood to mean pay given to a State hireling for 
treason to his country." He was assured, however, that he did not 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 37 

come within the definition ; and that the reward was given for what 
he had done, not for anything he was expected to do. After some 
hesitation, Johnson consented to accept the payment thus offered 
without the direct suggestion of any obligation, though it was prob- 
ably calculated that he would in case of need, be the more ready, 
as actually happened, to use his pen in defence of authority. He 
had not compromised his independence and might fairly laugh at 
angry comments. " I wish," he said afterwards, '• that my pension 
were twice as large, that they might make twice as much noise." 
" I cannot now curse the House of Hanover," was his phrase on 
another occasion; "but I think that the pleasure of cursing the 
House of Hanover and drinking King James's health, all amply 
overbalanced by three hundred pounds a year." In truth, his 
Jacobitism was bv this time, whatever it had once been, nothing 
more than a humorous crotchet, giving opportunity for the expres- 
sion of Tory prejudice. 

'• I hope you will now purge and live cleanly like a gentleman," 
was Beauclerk's comment upon hearing of his friend's accession of 
fortune, and as Johnson is now emerging from Grub Street, it is 
desirable to consider what manner of man was to be presented to 
the wider circles that were opening to receive him. 



^S :>.L1/U/;L roi/A'SOiV 



CHAPTER III. 
JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS. 

It is not till some time after Johnson had come into the enjoy, 
ment of his pension, that we first see him through the eyes of com- 
petent observers. The Johnson of our knowledge, the most familiar 
figure to all students of English literary history had already long 
passed the prime of life, and done the greatest part of his literary 
work. His character, in the common phrase, had been " formed " 
years before ; as, indeed, people's characters are chiefly formed in 
the cradle ; and, not only his character, but the habits which are 
learnt in the great schoolroom of the world were fixed beyond any 
possibility of change. The strange eccentricities which had now 
become a second nature, amazed the society in which he was for 
over twenty years a prominent figure. Unsympathetic observers, 
those especially to whom th6 Chesterfield type represented the 
ideal of humanity, were simply disgusted or repelled. The man, 
they thought, might be in his place at a Grub Street pot-house ; 
but had no business in a lady's drawing-room. If he had been 
modest and retiring, they might have put-up with his defects ; but 
Johnson was not a person whose qualities, good or bad, were of 
a kind^to be ignored. Naturally enough, the fashionable world 
cared little for the rugged old giant. " The great," said Johnson, 
"had tried him and given him up; they had seen enough of him;" 
and his i-eason was pretty much to the purpose. " Great lords 
and great ladies don't love to have their mouths stopped," espe- 
cially not, one may add, by an unwasjied fist. 

It is easy to blame them now. Everybody can see that a saint 
in beggar's rags is intrinsically better than a sinner in gold lace. 
But the principle is one of those which serves us for judging the 
dead, much more than for regulating our own conduct. Those, 
at any rate, may throw the first stone at tlie Horace Walpoles and 
Chesterfields, who are quite certain that they would ask a modern 
Johnson to tlieir houses. The trial would be severe. Poor Mrs. 
Boswell complained grievously of her husband's idolatry. " I hive 
seen many a bear led by a man," she said; "but I never before 
saw a man led by a bear." The truth is, as Boswell explains, that 
the sage's uncoutli habits, such as turning the candles' heads 
downwards to make them burn more brightly, and letting the wax 
drop upon the carpet, "could not but be disagreeable to a lady." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 39 

He had other habits still more annoying to people of delicate 
perceptions. A hearty despiser of all affectations, he despised 
especially the affectation of indifference to the pleasures of the 
table. '' For my part," he said, " I mind my belly very studiously 
and very carefully, for I look upon it that he who does not mind 
his belly will hardly mind anything else." Avowing this principle 
he would innocently give himself the airs of- a scientific epicure. 
". I, madam," he said to the terror of a lady with whom he was 
about to sup, "who live at a variety of good tables, am a much 
better judge of cookery than any person who has a very tolerable 
cook, but lives much at home, for his palate is gradually adapted 
to the taste of his cook, whereas, madam, in trying .by a wider 
range, I can more exc^uisitely judge." But his pretensions to 
exquisite taste are by no means borne out by independent wit- 
nesses. " He laughs," said Tom Davies, "like a rhinoceros," and 
he seems to have eaten like a wolf — savagely, silently, and with 
undiscriminating fury. He was not a pleasant object during this 
performance. He was totally absorbed in the busint.s of the 
moment, strong perspiration came out, and the veins of his fore- 
head swelled. He liked coarse satisfying dishes — boiled pork and 
veal-pie stuffed with plums and sugar; and in regard to wine, he 
seems to have accepted the doctrines of the critic of a certain fluid 
professing to be port, who asked, " What more can you want ? It is 
black, and it is thick, and it makes you drunk." Claret, as John- 
son put it, " is the liquor for boys, and port for men ; but he who 
aspires to be a hero must drink brandy." He could, however, re- 
frain, though he could not be moderate, and for all the latter part 
of his life, from 1766, he was a total abstainer. Nor, it should be 
added, does he ever appear to have sought for more than exhilara- 
tion from wine. His earliest intimate friend. Hector, said that he 
had never but once seen him drunk. 

His appetite for more innocent kinds of food was equally exces- 
sive. He would eat seven or eight peaches before break fast, and 
declared that he had only once in his life had as much wall-fruit as 
he wished. His consumption of tea was prodigious, beyond all 
precedent. Hawkins quotes Bishop Burnet as having drunk six- 
teen large cups every morning, a feat which would entitle him to be 
reckoned as a rival. " A hardened and shameless tea-drinker," 
Johnson called himself, who " with tea amuses the evenings, with 
tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the mornings." 
One of his teapots, preserved by a relic-hunter, contained two 
quarts, and he professed to have consumed five and twenty cups 
at a sitting. Poor Mrs. Thrale complains that he often kept her 
up making tea for him till four in the morning. His reluctance to 
go to bed was due to the fact that his nights were periods of 
intense misery; but the v^ast potations of tea can scarcely have 
tended to improve them. 

The huge frame was clad in the raggedest of garments, until 
his acquaintance with the Thrales led to a partial reform. His 
wigs were generally burnt in front, from his shortsighted knack of 



40 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

reading with his head close to the candle •, and at the Thrales, the 
butler stood ready to effect a change of wigs as he passed into the 
dining-room. Once or twice we have accounts of his bursting into 
unusual splendour. He appeared at the first representation of 
Irene in a scarlet waistcoat laced with gold ; and on one of his first 
interviews with Goldsmith he took the trouble to array himself 
decently, because Goldsmith was reported to have justified slovenly 
habits by the precedent of the leader of his craft. Goldsmith, judg- 
ing by certain famous suits, seems to have profited by the hint 
more than his preceptor. As a rule, Johnson's appearance, before 
he became a pensioner, was worthy of the proverbial manner of 
Grub Street. Beauclerk used to describe how he had once taken 
a French lady of distinction to see Johnson in his chambers. On 
descending the staircase they heard a noise like thunder. Johnson 
was pursuing them, struck by a sudden sense of the demands upon 
his gallantry. He brushed in between Beauclerk and the lad)-, and 
seizing her hand conducted her to her coach. " A crowd of people 
collected to stare at the sage, dressed in rusty brown, with a pair 
of old shoes for slippers, a shrivelled wig on the top of his head, 
and with shirtsleeves and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. 
In those days, clergymen and physicians were only just abandoning 
the use of their official costume in the streets, and Johnson's slov- 
enly habits were even more marked than they would be at present. 
" I have no passion for clean linen," he once remarked, and it is 
to be feared that he must sometimes have offended more senses 
than one. 

In spite of his uncouth habits of dress and manners, Johnson 
claimed, and in a sense, with justice, to be a polite man. " I look 
upon myself," he said once to Boswell " as a very polite man." 
He could show the stately courtesy of a sound Tory, who cordially 
accepts the principle of social distinction, but has far too strong a 
sense of self-respect to fancy that compliance with the ordinary 
conventions can possibly lower his own position. Rank of the 
spiritual kind was especially venerable to him. " I should as soon 
have thouglit of contradicting a bishop," was a phrase which marked 
the highest conceivable degree of deference to a man whom he 
respected. Nobody, again, could pay more effective compliments, 
wlien he pleased ; and the many female friends who have written 
of him who agree, that he could be. singularly attractive to women. 
Women are, perhaps, more inclined than men to forgive external 
roughness in consideration of the great charm of deep tenderness 
in a thoroughly masculine nature. A characteristic phrase was his 
remark to Miss Monckton. She had declared, in opposition to one 
of Johnson's prejudices, that Sterne's writings were pathetic : " I am 
sure," she said, " they have affected me." "Why," said Johnson, 
smiling and rolling himself about, "that is because, dearest, you 
are a dunce ! " When she mentioned this to him some time after- 
wards he replied : " Madam, if I had thought so, I certainly should 
not have said it." The truth could not be more neatly put. 

Boswell notes, with some surprise, that when Johnson dined 



SAMUEL JOH.YSON. 41 

with Lord Monboddo he insisted upon rising when the ladies left 
the table, and took occasion to observe that politeness was " ficti- 
tious benevolence," and equally useful in common intercourse. 
Boswell's surprise seems to indicate that Scotchmen in those days 
were even greater bears than Johnson. He always insisted, as Miss 
Reynolds tells us, upon showing ladies to their carriages through 
Bolt Court, though his dress was such that her readers would, she 
thinks, be astonished that any man in his senses should have shown 
himself in it abroad or even at home. Another odd indication of 
Johnson's regard for good manners, so far as his lights would take 
him, was the extreme disgust with which he often referred to a cer- 
tain footman in Paris, who used his fingers in place of sugar-tongs. 
So far as Johnson could recognise bad manners he was polite 
enough, though unluckily the limitation is one of considerable im- 
portance. 

Johnson's claim to politeness were sometimes, it is true, put in 
a rather startling form. " Every man of any education," he once 
said to the amazement of his hearers, " would rather be called a 
rascal than accused of deficiency in the graces." Gibbon, who was 
present, slily inquired of a lady whether among all her acquaintance 
she could not find one exception. According to Mrs. Thrale, 
he went even further. Dr. Barnard, he said, was the only man 
who had ever done justice to his good breeding; "and you may 
observe," he added, " that I am well-bred to a degree of need- 
less scrupulosity." He proceeded, according to Mrs Thrale, but 
tlie report a little taxes our faith, to claim the virtues not only of 
respecting ceremony, but of never contradicting or interrupting his 
hearers. It is rather odd that Dr. Barnard had once a sharp alter- 
cation with Johnson, and avenged himself by a sarcastic copy of 
verses in which, after professing to learn perfectness from different 
friends, he says, — 

Johnson shall teach me how to place, 

In varied light, each borrow'd grace ; » 

From him Dl learn to write ; 
Copy his clear familiar style, 
And by the roughness of his file, 

Grow, like himself, polite. 

Johnson, on this as on many occasions, repented of the blow as 
soon as it was struck, and sat down by Barnard, "literally smoothing 
down his arms and knees," and beseeching pardon. Barnard ac- 
cepted his apologies, but went home and wrote his little copy of 
verses. 

Johnson's shortcomings in civility were no doubt due, in part, to 
the narrowness of his faculties of perception. He did not know, for 
he could not see, that his uncouth gestures and slovenly dress were 
offensive ; and he was not so well able to observe others as to shake 
off tlie manners contracted in Grub Street. It is hard to study a 
manual of etiquette late in life, and for a man of Johnson's imper- 



42 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

feet faculties it was probably impossible. Errors of this kind were 
always pardonable, and are now simply ludicrous. But Johnson 
often shocked his companions by more indefensible conduct. He 
was irascible, overbearing, and, when angry, vehement beyond all 
propriety. He was " a tremendous companion," said Garrick's 
brother ; and men of gentle nature, like Charles Fox, often shrank 
from his company, and perhaps exaggerated his brutality. 

Johnson, who had long regarded conversation as the chief 
amusement, came in later years to regard it as almost the chief em- 
ployment of life ; and he had studied the art with the zeal of a man 
pursuing a favourite hobby. He had always, as he told Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, made it a principle to talk on all occasions as well as he 
could. He had thus obtained a mastery over his weapons which 
made him one of the most accomplished of conversational gladia- 
tors. He had one advantage which has pretty well disappeared 
from modern society, and the disappearance of which has been de- 
structive to excellence of talk. A good talker, even more than a 
good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast 
and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance. For the 
formation of real proficiency in the art, friends should meet often, 
sit long, and be thoroughly at ease. A modern audience generally . 
breaks up before it is well warmed through, and includes enough 
strangers to break the magic circle of social electricity. The clubs in 
which Johnson deligiited were excellently adapted to foster his pe- 
culiar talent. There a man could "fold his legs and have his talk 
out "—a pleasure hardly to be enjoyed now. And there a set of 
friends meeting regularly, and meeting to talk, learnt to sharpen each 
other's skill in all dialectic manoeuvres. Conversation maybe pleas- 
antest, as Johnson admitted, when two friends meet quietly to ex- 
change their minds without any thought of display. But conversa- 
tion considered as a game, as a bout of intellectual sword-play, has 
also charms which Johnson intensely appreciated. His talk was 
not of the encyclopaedia variety, like that of some more modern 
celebrities; but it was full of apposite illustrations and unrivalled in 
keen argument, rapid flashes of wit and humour, scornful retort and 
dexterous sophistry. Sometimes he would fell his adversary at a 
blow; his sword, as Boswell said, would be through your body in 
an instant without preliminary flourishes ; and in the excitement of 
talking for victory, he would use any device that came to hand. 
" There is no arguing with Johnson," said Goldsmith, quoting 
a plirase from Cibber, "for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you 
down with the butt-end of it." 

Johnson's view of conversation is indicated by his remark about 
Burke. " That fellow/' he said at a time of illness, " calls forth 
all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me." " It 
is when you come close to a man in conversation," he said on an- 
other occasion, "that you discover what his real abilities are. To 
maJ<e a speech in an assembly is a knack. Now 1 honour Thurlow, 
sir; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he fairly ])nts his mind lo yours." 

Johnson's retorts were fair play under the conditions of the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 43 

game, as it is fair pla\- to kick an opponent's sbinB at football. But 
of course a man who had, as it were, become the acknowledged 
champion of the ring, and who had an irascible and thoroughly 
dogmatic temper, was tempted to become unduly imperious. In 
the company of ^hich .Savage was a distinguished member, one 
may guess that the conversational fervour sometimes degenerated 
into horse-play. Want of arg.uments would be supplied by person- 
ality, and the champion would avenge himself by brutality on an 
opponent who happened for once to be getting the best of him. 
Johnson, as he grew older and got into more polished society, be- 
came milder in his manners; but he had enough of the old spirit 
left in him to break forth at' times with ungovernable fury, and aston- 
ish the well-regulated minds of respectable ladies and gentlemen. 

Anecdotes illustrative of this ferocity abound, and his best 
friends — except, perhaps, Reynolds and Burke — had all to suffer in 
turn. On one occasion, when he had made a rude speech even to 
Reynolds, Boswell states, though with some hesitation, his belief 
that Johnson actually blushed. The records of his contests in this 
kind fill a large space in Boswell's pages. That they did not lead 
to worse consequences shows his absence of rancour. He was 
always ready and anxious for a reconciliation, though he would not 
press for one if his first overtures were rejected. There was no 
venom in the wounds he inflicted, for there was no ill-nature; he 
was rough in the heat of the struggle, and in such cases careless in 
distributing blows ; but he never enjoyed giving pain. None of 
his tiffs ripened into permanent quarrels, and he seems scarcely to 
have lost a friend. He is a pleasant contrast in this, as in much 
else, to Horace VValpole, wlio succeeded, in the course of a long 
life, in breaking with almost all his old friends. No man set a 
higher value upon friendship than Johnson. " A man," he said to 
Reynolds, "ought to keep his friendship in constant repair; " or 
l.e would find himself left alone as he grew older. " I look upon a 
day as lost," he said later in life, " in which I do not make a new 
acquaintance." Making new acquaintances did not involve drop- 
ping the old. The list of his friends is along one, and includes, as 
it were, successive layers, superposed upon each other, from the 
earliest period of his life. 

This is so marked a feature in Johnson's character, that it will 
be as well at this point to notice some of the friendships from which 
he derived the greatest part of his happiness. Two of his school- 
fellows. Hector and Taylor, remained his intimates through life. 
Hector survived to give information to Boswell, and Taylor, then a 
prebendary of Westminster, read the funeral service over his old 
friend in the Abbey. He showed, said some of the bystanders, 
too little feeling. The relation between the two men was not one 
of special tenderness ; indeed they were so little congenial that 
Boswell rather gratuitously suspected his venerable teacher of hav- 
ing an eye to Taylor's will. It seems fairer to regard the acquaint- 
ance as an illustration of that curious adhesiveness which made 
Johnson cling to less attractive persons. At any rate, he did not 



44 SAMUEL /OIINSON. 

show the complacence of the proper will-hunter. Taylor was 
rector of Busworth and squire of Ashbourne He was a fine speci- 
men of tlie squire-parsun ; a justice of the peace, a warm politician, 
and what was worse, a warm Whig. He raised gigantic bulls, 
bragged of selling cows for 120 guineas and more, and kept a noble 
butler in purple clothes and a large white wig. Johnson respected 
Taylor as a sensible man, but was ready to have a round with him 
on occasion. He snorted contempt when Taylor talked of break- 
ing some small vessels if he took an emetic. " Bah," said the 
doctor, who regarded a valetudinarian as a "scoundrel," " if you 
have so many things that will break, you had better break your 
neck at once, and there's an end on't." Nay, if he did not con~ 
demn Taylor's cows, he criticised his bulldog with cruel acuteness. 
" No, sir, he is not well-shaped ; for there is not the quick transition 
from the thickness of the fore-part to the tenuity — the thin part — 
behind, which a bulldog ought to have." On the more serious 
topic of politics his Jacobite fulminations roused Taylor "to a 
pitch of bellowing." Johnson roared out that if the people of Eng- 
land were fairly polled (this was in 1777) the present king would be 
sent away to-night, and his adherents hanged to-morrow. Johnson, 
however, rendered Taylor the substantial service of writing sermons 
for him, two volumes of which were published after they were both 
dead ; and Taylor must have been a bold man, if it be true, as has 
been said, that he refused to preach a sermon written by Johnson 
upon Mrs. Johnson's death, on the ground that it spoke too favour- 
ably of the character of the deceased. 

Johnson paid frequent visits to Lichfield, to keep up his old 
friends. One of them was Lucy Porter, his wife's daughter, with 
whom, according to Miss Seward, he had been in love before he 
married her mother. He was at least tenderly attached to her 
through life. And, for the most part, the good people of Lichfield 
seem to have been proud of their fellow-townsman, and gave him a 
substantial proof of their sympathy by continuing to him, on favour-, 
able terms, the lease of a house originally granted to his father. 
There was, indeed, one remarkable exception in Miss Seward, who 
belonged to a genus specially contemptible to the old doctor. She 
was one of the fine ladies w-ho dabbled in poetr\f, and aimed at 
being the centre of a small literary circle at Lichfield. Her letters 
are amongst the most amusing illustrations of the petty affectations 
and squabbles characteristic of such a provincial clique. She 
evidently hated Johnson at the bottom of her small soul ; and, in- 
deed, though Johnson once paid her-a preposterous compliment — 
a weakness of which this stern moralist was apt to be guilty in the 
company of ladies — he no doubt trod pretty roughly upon some of 
her pet vanities. 

By far the most celebrated of Johnson's Lichfield friends was 
David Garrick, in regard to whom his relations were somewhat 
peculiar. Reynolds said that Johnson considered Garrick to be 
his own property, and would never allow him to be praised or blamed 
by any one else without contradiction. Reynolds composed a pair 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 45 

of imaginary dialogues to illustrate the proposition, in one of which 
Johnson attacks Garrick in answer to Reynolds, and in the other 
defends h'm in answer to Gibbon. The dialogues seem to be very 
good reproductions of the Johnsonian manner, though perhaps the 
courteous Reynolds was a little too much impressed by its rough- 
ness ; and they probably include many genuine remarks of John- 
son's. It is remarkable that the praise is far more pointed and 
elaborate than the blame, which turns chiefly upon the general in- 
feriority of an actor's position. And, in fact, this seems to have 
corresponded to Johnson's opinion about Garrick as gathered from 
Boswell. 

The two men had at bottom a considerable regard for each 
other, founded upon old association, mutual services, and recipro- 
cal respect for talents of very different orders. But they were so 
widely separated by circumstances, as well as by a radical opposi- 
tion of temperament, that any close intimacy could hardly be ex- 
pected. The bear and the monkey are not likely to be intimate 
friends. Garrick's rapid elevation in fame and fortune seems to 
have produced a certain degree of envy in his old' schoolmaster. 
A grave moral philosopher has, of course, no right to look askance 
at the rewards which fashion lavishes upon men of lighter and less 
lasting merit, and which he professes to despise. Johnson, how- 
ever, was troubled with a rather excessive allowance of human 
nature. Moreover he had the good old-fashioned contempt for 
players, characteristic both of the Tory and the inartistic mind. 
He asserted roundly that he looked upon players as no better than 
dancing-dogs. " But, sir, you will allow that some players are 
better than others.''" "Yes, sir, as some dogs dance better than 
others." So when Goldsmith accused Garrick of grossly flattering 
the queen, Johnson exclaimed, " And as to meanness — how is it 
mean in a player, a showman, a fellow who exhibits himself for a 
shilling, to flatter his queen ? " At another time Boswell suggested 
that we might respect a great player. " What ! sir," exclaimed 
Johnson, "a fellow who claps a hump upon his back and a lump on 
his leg and cries, ' I am Richard HI.' ? Nay, sir, a ballad-singer is 
is a higher man, for he does -two things : he repeats and he sings ; 
there is both recitation and music in his performance — the player 
only recites." 

'Such sentiments were not very likely to remain unknown to 
Garrick nor to put him at ease with Johnson, whom, indeed, he 
always suspected of laughing at him. They had a little tiff on ac- 
count of Johnson's Edition of Shakspeare. From some misunder- 
standing, Johnson did not make use of Garrick's collection of old 
plays. Johnson, it seems, thought that Garrick should have courted 
him more, and perhaps sent the plays to his house ; whereas Gar- 
rick, knowing that Johnson treated books with a roughness ill- 
suited to their constitution, thought that he had done quite enough 
by asking Johnson to come to his library. The revenge — if it was 
revenge — taken by Johnson was to say nothing of Garrick in his 
Preface, and to glance obliquely at his non-communication of his 



45 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

rarities. He seems to have thought that it would be a lowering of 
Shakspeare to admit that his fame owed anything to Garrick's ex- 
ertions. 

Boswell innocently communicated to Garricka criticism of John- 
son's upon one of his poems — 

I'd smile with the simple and feed with the poor. 

" Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich," was John- 
son^s tolerably harmless remark. Garrick, however, did not like it, 
and when Boswell tried to console him by saying that Johnson 
gored everybody in turn, and added, "■ fa;nu/n habct in cornu." 
" Ay," said Garrick vehemently, " he has a whole mow of it." 

The most unpleasant incident was when Garrick proposed 
rather too freely to be a member of the Club. Johnson said that 
the first duke in England had no right to use such language, and 
said, according to Mrs. Thrale, " If Garrick does apply, I'll black- 
ball him. Surely we ought to be able to sit in a society like 
ours — 

' Unelbowed by a gamester, pimp, or player ! ' " 

Nearly ten years afterwards, however, Johnson favoured his 
election, and when he died, declared that the Club should have a 
year's widowhood. No successor to Garrick was elected during 
that time. 

Johnson sometimes ventured to criticise Garrick's acting, but 
here Garrick could take his full revenge. The purblind Johnson 
was not, we may imagine, much of a critic in such matters. Gar- 
rick reports him to have said of an actor at Lichfield, " There is a 
courtly vivacity about the fellow ; " when, in fact, said Garrick, 
"he was the most vulgar ruffian that ever went upon boards." 

In spite of such collisions of opinion and mutual criticism, John- 
son seems to have spoken in the highest terms of Garrick's good 
qualiiies, and they had many pleasant meetings. Garrick takes a 
prominent part in two or three of the best conversations in Bos- 
well, and seems to have put his interlocutors in specially good 
temper. Johnson declared him to be " the first man in the world 
for sprightly conversation." He said that Dryden had written 
much better prologues than any of Garrick's, but that Garrick had 
written more good prologues than Dryden. He declared that it 
was wonderful how little Garrick had been spoilt by all the flattery 
that he had received. No wonder if he was a little vain : " a man 
who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived : 
so many bellows have blown the fuel, that one wonders he is not 
by this time become a cinder ! " " If all this had happened to me," 
he said on another occasion, " I should have had a couple of fellows 
with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that 
stood in the way. Consider, if all this had happened to Cibber 
and Quin, they'd have jumped over the moon. Yet Garrick speaks 
to us," smihng. He admitted at the same time that Garrick had 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 47 

raised the profession of a player. He defended Garrick, too, 
against the common charge of avarice. Garrick, as he pointed out, 
had been brought up in a family whose study it was to make four- 
pence go as far as fourpence-halfpenny. Johnson remembered in 
early days drinking tea with Garrick when Peg Wolifington made 
it, and made it, as Garrick grumbled, " as red as blood." But 
when Garrick became rich he became Hberal. He had, so Johnson 
declared, given away more money than any man in England. 

After Garrick's death, Johnson took occasion to say, in the 
Lives of the Poets, that the deatH "had eclipsed the gaiety of 
nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasures." 
Boswell ventured to criticise the observation rather spitefully. 
" Why nations ? Did his gaiety extend further than his own na- 
tion ? " " Why, sir," replied Johnson,- "some imagination must be 
allowed. Besides, we may say nations if we allow the Scotch to 
be a nation, and to have gaiety — which they have not." On the 
whole, in spite of various drawbacks, Johnson's reported observa- 
tions upon Garrick will appear to be discriminative, and yet, on 
the whole, strongly favourable to his character. Yet we are not 
quite surprised that Mrs. Garrick did not respond to a hint thrown 
but by Johnson, that he would be glad to write the life of his 
friend. 

At Oxford, Johnson acquired the friendship of Dr. Adams, 
afterwards Master of PL'ml)roke and author of a once well-known 
reply to Hume's argument upon miracles. He was an amiable 
man, and was proud to do the honours of the university to his old 
friend, when, in later years, Johnson revisited the much-loved 
scenes of his neglected youth. The warmth of Johnson's regard 
for old days is oddly illustrated by an interview recorded by Bos- 
well with one Edwards, a fellow-student whom he met again in 
1778, not having previously seen him since 1729. They had lived 
in London for forty years without once meeting, a fact more sur- 
prising then than now. Boswell eagerly gathered up the little 
scraps of college anecdote which the meeting produced, but per- 
haps his best find was a phrase of Edwards himself. "You are a 
philosopher. Dr. Johnson," he said ; " I have tried, too, in my time 
to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was al- 
ways breaking in." The phrase, as Boswell truly says, records an 
exquisite trait of character. 

Of the friends who gathered round Johnson during his period 
of struggle, ma/13' had vanished before he became well known. 
The best loved of all seems to have been Dr. Bathurst, a physician, 
who, failing to obtain practice, joined the expedition to Havannah, 
and fell a victim to the climate (1762). Upon him Johnson pro- 
nounced a panegyric which has contributed a proverbial phrase to 
the language. " Dear Bathurst," he said, " was a man to my very 
heart's content : he hated a fool and he hated a rogue, and he 
hated a Whig ; \\& wa.?, ■^ t/ery good hater.''^ Johnson remembered 
Bathurst in his prayers for years after his l®ss, and received from 
him a peculiar legacy. Francis Barber had been the negro slave 



48 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

of Bathurst's father, who left Iiim liis Hberty by will. Dr. Bath- 
urst allowed him to enter Johnson's' service ; and Johnson sent 
him to school at considerable expense, and afterwards retained 
him in his service with little interruption till his own death. Once 
Barber ran away to sea, and was discharged, oddly enough, by the 
good offices of Wilkes, to whom Smollett applied on Johnson's be- 
half. Barber became an important member of Johnson's family, 
some of whom reproached him for his liberality to the nigo-er. No 
one ever solved the great problem as to what services were ren- 
dered by Barber to his master, whose wig was " as impenetrable 
by a comb as a quickset hedge," and whose clothes were never 
touched by the brush. 

Among the other friends of this period must be reckoned his 
biographer, Hawkins, an attorney who was afterwards Chairman 
of the Middlesex Justices, and knighted on presenting an address 
to the King. Boswell regarded poor Sir John Hawkins with all 
the animosity of a rival author, and with some spice of wounded 
vanity. He was grievously offended, so at least says Sir John's 
daughter, on being described in the Life of Johnson as " Mr. 
James Boswell" without a solitary epithet sucJi as celebrated or 
well-known. If that was really his feeling, he had his revenge ; 
for no one book ever so suppressed another as Boswell's Life sup- 
pressed Hawkins's. In truth, Hawkins was a solemn prig, re- 
markable chiefly for the unusual intensity of his conviction that all 
virtue consists in respectability. He had a special aversion to 
" goodness of heart," which he regarded as another name for a 
quality properly called extravagance or vice. Johnson's tenacity 
of old acquaintance introduced him into the Club, where he made 
himself so disagreeable, especially, as it seems, by rudeness to 
Burke, that he found it expedient to invent a pretext for resigna- 
tion. Johnson called him a " very unclubable man." and may per- 
haps have intended him in the quaint description : " 1 really be- 
lieve him to be an honest man at the bottom ; though, to be sure, 
he is rather penurious, and he is somewhat mean ; and it must be 
owned he has some degree of brutality, and is not without a ten- 
dency to savageness tliat cannot well be defended." 

In a list of Johnson's friends it is proper to mention Richard- 
son and Hawkesworth. Richardson seems to have given him 
substantial help, and was repaid by favourable comparisons with 
Fielding, scarcely borne out by the verdict of posterity. " Field- 
ing," said Johnson, "could tell the hour by looking at the clock ; 
whilst Richardson knew how the clock was made." " There is 
more knowledge of the heart," he said at another time, " in one 
letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones. Johnson's prefer- 
ence of the sentimentalist to the man whose humour and strong- 
sense were so like his own, shows how much his criticism was 
biassed by his prejudices ; though, of course, Richardson's ex- 
ternal decency was a recommendation to the moralist. Hawkes- 
worth's intimacy with Johnson seems to have been chiefly in the 
period between the Dictioiimy and the pension. He was consid- 



SAMUEL JOHiYSON. 4g 

ered to bfe Johnson's best imitator; and has vanished like otlier 
imitators. His fate, very doubtful if the story believed at the 
time be trne, was a curious one for a friend of Johnson's. He had 
made some sceptical remarks as to the efficacy of prayer in his 
preface to the South Sea Voyages ; and was so bitterly attacked 
by a " Christian " in the papers, that he destroyed himself by a 
dose of opium. 

Two younger friends, who became disciples of tlie sage soon 
after the appearance of the Ranibli'i; are prominent figures in the 
later circle. One of these was Bennet Langton, a man of good 
family, fine scholarship, and very amiable character. His exceed- 
ingly tall and slender figure was compared by Best to the stork in 
Raphael's cartoon of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. Miss 
Hawkins describes him sitting with one leg twisted round the 
other as though to occupy the smallest possible space, and playing 
with his gold snuff-bo.x with a mild countenance and sweet smile. 
The gentle, modest creature was loved by Johnson, who could 
warm into unusual eloquence in singing his praises. The doctor, 
however, was rather fond of discussing with Boswell the faults of 
his friend. They seem -to have chiefly consisted in a certain lan- 
guor or sluggishness of temperament which allowed his affairs to 
get into perplexity. Once, when arguing the delicate question as 
to the propriety of telling a friend of his wife's unfaithfulness, Bos- 
well, after his peculiar fashion, chose to enliven the abstract state- 
ment by the purely imaginary hypothesis of Mr. and Mrs. Langton 
being in this position. Johnson said that it would be useless to 
tell Langton, because he would be too sluggish to get a divorce. 
Once Langton was the unconscious cause of one of Johnson's 
oddest performances. Langton had employed Chambers, a com- 
mon friend of his and Johnson's, to draw his will. Johnson, talk- 
ing to Chambers and Boswell, was suddenly struck by the absurd- 
ity of his friend's appearing in the character of testator. His 
companions, however, were utterly unable to see in what the joke 
consisted ; but Johnson laughed obstreperously and irrepressibly : 
he laughed till he reached the Temple Gate ; and when in Fleet 
Street went almost into convulsions of hilarity. Holding on by 
one of the posts in the street, he sent forth such peals of laughter 
that they seemed in the silence of the night to resound from Tem- 
ple Bar to Fleet Ditch. 

Not long before his death, Johnson applied to Langton for 
spiritual advice. " I desired him to tell me sincerely in what he 
thought my life was faulty." Langton wrote upon a sheet of paper 
certain texts recommending Christian charity; and explained, upon 
inquiry, that he was pointing at Johnson's habit of contradiction. 
The old doctor began by thanking him earnestly for his kindness ; 
but gradually waxed savage and asked Langton, "in a loud and 
angry tone. What is your drift, sir?" He complained of the well- 
meant advice to Boswell, with a sense that he had been unjustly 
treated. It was a scene for a comedy, as Reynolds observed, to 
see a penitent get into a oassion and belabour his confessor. 

4 



5° 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



Through Langton, Johnson became acquainted with the friend 
whose manner was in the strongest contrast to his own. Topham 
Beauclerk was a m in of fashion. He was commended to Johnson 
by a likeness to Charles II., from whom he was descended, being 
tiie grandson of the first Duke of St. Alban's. Beauclerk was a 
man of literar}' and scientific tastes. He inherited some of the 
ni . il laxity which Johnson chose to pardon in his ancestor. Some 
years after his acquaintance with Boswell he married Lady Diana 
Spencer, a lady who had Ijeen divorced upon his account from her 
husband, Lord Bolinghroke. But he took care not to obtrude his 
faults of life, whatever they may have been, upon the old moralist, 
who entertained for him a peculiar affection. He specially admired 
Beauclerk's skill in the use of a more polished, if less vigorous, 
style of conversation than his own. He envied the ease with which 
Beauclerk brought out his sly incisive retorts. " No man," he said, 
"ever was so free when he vvas going to say a good thing, from a 
look that expressed that it was coming ; or, when he had said it, 
from a look that expressed that it had come." When Beauclerk 
was dying (in 1780), Johnson said, with a faltering voice, that he 
would walk to the extremity of the diameter of the earth to save 
him. Two little anecdotes are expressive of his tender feeling for 
this incongruous friend. Boswell had asked him to sup at Beau- 
clerk's. He started, but, on the way, recollecting himself, said, " I 
cannot go; but / do not love Beauclerk the less.''' Beauclerk had 
put upon a portrait of Johnson the inscription, — 

Ingenium iirgens 
Inculto latet hoc sub corpore. 

Langto who bought the portrait, had the inscription removed. 
" It was kind in you to take it off," said Johnson ; and, after a short 
pause, " not unkind in him to put it on." 

Early in their acquaintance, the two young men, Beau and Lanky, 
as Johnson called them, had set up one night at a tavern till three 
in the morning. The courageous thought struck them that they 
would knock up the old philosopher. He came to the door of his 
chambers, poker in hand, with an old wig for a nightcap. On hear- 
ing their errand, the sage exclaimed, " What ! is it you, you dogs ? 
ril have a frisk with you." And so Johnson with the two youths, 
his juniors by about thirty years, proceeded to make a night of it. 
They amazed the fruiterers in Covent Garden - they brewed a bowl 
of bishop in a tavern, while Johnson quoted the poet's address to 
Sleep, — 

" Short, A short, be then thy reign. 
And give us to the world again!" 

They took a boat to Billingsgate, and Johnson, with Beauclerk, 
kept up their amusement for the following day, Avhen Langton 
deserted them to go to breakfast with some young ladies, and John- 
son scolded him for leaving his friends "to go and sit with a parcel 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 51 

of wretched tdtidea'd girls." " I shall have my old friend to bail 
out of the round-house," said Garrick when he heard of this queer 
aUiance ; and he told Johnson that he would be in the Chronicle 
for his frolic. " He durst not do such a thing. His wife would not 
let him," was the moralist's retort. 

Some friends, known to fame by other titles than their connexion 
with Johnson, had by this time gathered round them. Among them 
was one, whose art he was unable to appreciate, but whose fine 
social qualities and dignified equability of temper made him a valued 
andfrespected companion. Reynolds had settled in London at the 
end of 1752. Johnson met him at the house of Miss Cotterell. 
Reynolds had specially admired Johnson's Life of Savage, and, on 
their first meeting, happened to make a remark which dehghted 
Johnson. The ladies were regretting the loss of a friend to whom 
they were under obligations. " You have, however," said Reynolds, 
"the comfort of being relieved from a burden of gratitude." The 
s.aying is a little too much like Rochefoucauld, and too true to be 
pleasant ; but it was one of those keen remarks which Johnson 
appreciated because they prick a bubble of commonplace moralising 
without demanding too literal an acceptation. He went home to 
sup with Reynolds and became his intimate friend. On another 
occasion, Johnson was offended by two ladies of rank at the same 
house, and by way of taking down their pride, asked Reynolds in 
a loud voice, "How much do you think you and I could get in a 
week, if we both worked as hard as we could ? " " His appear- 
ance," says Sir Joshua's sister, Miss Reynolds, " might suggest 
the poor author: as he was not likely in that place to be a black- 
smith or a porter." Poor Miss Reynolds, who tells this story, was 
another attraction to Reynolds' house. She was a shy, retiring 
maiden lady, who vexed her famous brother by following in his 
steps without his talents, and was deeply hurt by his annoyance 
at the unintentional mockery. Johnson was through life a kind and 
judicious friend to her; and had attracted her on their first meeting 
by a significant indication of his character. He said that when 
going home to his lodgings at one or two in the morning, he often 
saw poor children asleep on thresholds and stalls — the wretched 
"street Arabs " of the day — and that he used to put pennies into 
their hands that they might buy a breakfast. 

Two friends, who deserve to beplaced beside Reynolds, came 
from Ireland to seek their fortunes in London. Edmund Burke, 
incomparably the greatest writer upon political philosophy in Eng- 
lish literature, the master of a style unrivalled for richness, flexi- 
bility, and vigour, was radically opposed to Johnson on party ques- 
tions, though his language upon the French Revolution, after 
Johnson's death, would have satisfied even the strongest prejudices 
of his old friend. But he had qualities which commended him even 
to the man who called him a " bottomless Whig," and who gen- 
erally spoke of Whigs as rascals, and maintained that the first 
Whig was the devil. If his intellect was wider, his heart was as 
warm as Johnson's, and in conversation he merited the generous ap- 



52 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

plause and warm emulation of his friends. Johnson was never tired 
of praising the extraordinary readiness and spontaneity of Burke's 
conversation. " If a man," he said, " went undi^r a shed at the 
same time with Burke to avoid a shower, he ua-uld say, ' This is 
an extraordinary man.' Or if Burke went into a stable to see his 
horse dressed, the ostler would say, ' We have had an extraordi- 
nary man here.' " When Burke was first going into Ptirliament, 
Johnson said in answer to Hawkins, who wondered that such a man 
should get a seat, " We who know Mr. Burke, know that he will 
be one of the first men in the country." Speaking of certain other 
members of Parliament, more after the heart of -Sir John Hawkins, 
he said that he grudged success to a man who made a figure by a 
knowledge of a few forms, though his mind was " a'S narrow as the 
neck of a vinegar cruet;" but then he did not grudge Burke's 
being the first man in the House of Commons, for he would be the 
first man everywhere. And Burke equally admitted Johnson's 
supremacy in conversation. " It is enough for me," he said tg 
some one who regretted Johnson's monopoly of the talk on a par- 
ticular occasion, " to have rung the bell for him." 

The other Irish adventurer, whose career was more nearly 
moulded upon that of Johnson, came to London in 1756, and made 
Johnson's acquaintance. Some time afterwards (in or before 
1 761) Goldsmith, like Johnson, had tasted the bitterness of an 
usher's life, and escaped into the scarcely more tolerable region 
of Grub Street. After some years of trial, he was becoming known to 
the booksellers as.a serviceable hand, and had two works in his desk 
destined to lasting celebrity. His landlady (apparently 1764) one 
day arrested him for debt. Johnson, summoned to his assistance, 
sent him a guinea and speedily followed. The guinea had already 
been changed, and Goldsmith was consoling himself with a bottle 
of Madcria. Johnson corked the bottle, and a discussion of ways 
and means brought out the manuscript of the Vicar of IVakcJield. 
Johnson looked into it, took it to a bookseller, got sixty pounds for 
it, and returned to Goldsmith, who paid his rent and administered 
a sound rating to his landlady. 

The relation thus indicated is characteristic ; Johnson was as 
a rough but helpful elder brother to poor Goldsmith, gave him 
advice, sympathy, and applause, and at times criticised him pretty 
sharply, or brought down his conversational bludgeon upon his sen- 
sitive friend. " He has nothing of the bear but his skin," was 
Goldsmith's comment upon his clumsy friend, and the two men ap- 
preciated each other at bottom. Some of their readers may be in- 
clined to resent Johnson's attitude of superiority. The admirably 
pure and tender heart, and the exc|uisite intellectual refinement im- 
plied in the Vicar and ihtTravel/er, force us to love Goldsmith in 
spite of superficial foibles, and when Johnson prunes or interpolates 
lines in the Traveller, we feel as though a woodman's axe was 
hacking at a most delicate piece of carving. The evidence of con- 
temporary observers, however, must force impartial readers to admit 
that Goldsmith's foibles were real, however amply compensated by 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 1^3 

rare and admirable qualities. Garrick's assertion, that he " wrote 
like an angel but talked like poor Poll," expresses the unani- 
mous opinion of all who liad actually seen him. Undoubtedly some 
of the stories of his childish vanity, his frankly expressed envy, and 
his general capacity for blundering, owe something to Boswell's 
feeling that he was a rival near the throne, and sometimes poor 
Goldsmith's humorous self-assertion may have been taken too seri- 
ously by blunt English wits. One may doubt, for example, whether 
he was really jealous of a puppet tossing a pike, and unconscious of 
his absurdity in saying "Pshaw! 1 could do it better myself!" 
Boswell, however, was too good an observer to misrepresent at 
random, and he has, in fact, explained very well the true meaning 
of his remarks. Goldsmith was an excitable Irishman of genius, 
who tumbled out whatever came uppermost, and revealed the feel- 
ings of the moment with an utter want of reserve. His self-controlled 
companions wondered, ridiculed, misinterpreted, and made fewer 
hits as well as fewer misses. His anxiety "to get in and shine," 
made him, according to Johnson, an "unsocial" companion. 
" Goldsmith," he said, " had not temper enough for the game he 
played. He staked too much. A man might always get a fall from 
his inferior in the chances of talk, and Goldsmith felt his wounds too 
keenly." He had certainly some trials of temper in Johnson's 
company. "Stay, stay," said a German, stopping him in the full 
flow of his eloquence, " Toctor Johnson is going to say something." 
An Eton Master called Graham, who was supping with the two 
doctors, and had got to the pitch of looking at one person, and 
talking to another, said, " Doctor, I shall be glad to see yoii at 
Eton." " I shall be glad to wait on you," said Goldsmith. " No," 
.leplied Graham, " 'tis not you I mean. Doctor Minor ; 'tis Doctor 
Major there." Poor Goldsmith said afterwards, '' Graham is a 
fellow to make one commit suicide." 

Boswell who attributes some of Goldsmith's sayings about John- 
son to envy, said with probable truth that Goldsmith had not more 
envy than others, but only spoke of it more freely. Johnson argued 
that we must be angry with a man who had so much of an odious 
quality that he could not keep it to himself, but let it " boil over." 
The feeling, at any rate, was momentary and totally free from 
malice ; and Goldsmith's criticisms upon Johnson and his idolators 
seem to have been fair enough. His objection to Boswell's sub- 
stituting a monarchy for a republic has already been mentioned. 
At another time he checked Boswell's flow of panegyric by asking, 
" Is he like Burke, who winds into a subject like a serpent ? " To 
which Boswell replied with charming irrelevance, "Johnson is the 
Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle." The- last of Gold- 
smith's hits was suggested by Johnson's shaking his sides with 
laughter because Goldsmith admired the skill with which the little 
fishes in the fable were made to talk in character. " Why, Dr. 
Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think," was the retort, 
" for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like 
whales." 



54 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

In spite of sundry little sparrings, Johnson fully appreciated 

Goldsmith's genius. Possibly his autliority hastened the spread of 
public appreciation, as he seemed to claim, whilst repudiating Bos- 
welFs too flattering theory that it had materially raised Goldsmith's 
position. When Reynolds quoted the authority of Fox in favour 
of the Traveller, saying that his friends might suspect that they 
had been too partial, Johnson replied very truly that the Traveller 
was beyond the need -of Fox's praise, and that the partiality of 
Goldsmith's friends had always been against him. They would 
hardly give him a hearing. " Goldsmith," he added, " was a man 
who, whatever he wrote, always did it better than any other man 
could do." Johnson's settled opinion in fact was that embodied in 
the famous epitaph with its "nihil tetiget quod non ornavit," and, 
though dedications are perhaps the only iucrary product more gen- 
erally insincere than epitaphs, we may believe that Goldsmith too 
meant what he said in the dedication of She Stoops to Conquer. 
'• It may do me some honour to inform the public that I have lived 
many years in intimacy with you. It may serve the interests of 
mankind also to inform them that the greatest wit may be found in 
a character, without impairing the most unaffected piety." 

Though Johnson was thus rich in friendship, two connexions 
have still to be noticed which had an exceptional bearing upon his 
fame and happiness. In January, 1765, he made the acquaintance 
of the Thrales. Mr. Thrale was the proprietor of the brewery 
which afterwards became that of Barclay and Perkins. He was 
married in 1763 to a Miss Hester Lynch Salisbury, who has become 
celebrated from her friendship with Johnson.* She was a woman 
of great vivacity and independence of cha:acter. She had a sen- 
sitive and passionate, if not a very tender nature, and enough liter- 
ary culture to appreciate Johnson's intellectual power, and on oc- 
casion to play a very respectable part in conversation. She had 
far more Latin and Englisli scholarship than fell to the lot of most 
ladies of her day, and wit enough to preserve lier from degenerat- 
ing like some of the '■ blues," into that most offensive of beings — 
a feminine prig. Her marriage had been one of convenience, and 
her husband's want of sympathy, and jealousy of any interference 
in business matters, forced her, she says, to take to literature as 
her sole resource. " No wonder," she adds, " if I loved my books 
and children." It is, perhaps, more to be wondered at that her 
children seem to have had a rather subordinate place in her 
affections. The marriage, however, though not of the happiest, 
was perfectly decorous. Mrs. Thrale discharged her domestic du- 
ties irreproachably, even when she seems to have had some real 
cause of complaint. To the world she eclipsed her husband, a solid 
respectable man, whose mind, according to Johnson, struck the 
hours very regularly, though it did not mark the minutes. 

The Thrales were introduced to Johnson by their common 
friend, Arthur Murphy, an actor and dramatist, who afterwards be- 

* Mrs. Thrale was born in 1740 or 1741, probably the latter. Thrale v/as born in 17J4. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 55 

came the editor of Johnson's works. One day, when calh'ng upon 
Johnson, they found him in such a fit of despair that Thrale tried 
to stop his mouth by placing his hand before it. The pair then 
joined in begging Johnson to leave his solitary abode, and come to 
them at their country-house at Streatham. He complied, and for 
the next sixteen years a room was set apart for him, both at Strea- 
tham and in their house in Southwark. He passed a large part of 
his time with them, and derived from the intimacy most of the com- 
fort of his later years. He treated Mrs. Thrale with a kind of pa- 
ternal gallantry, her age at the time, of their acquaintance being 
twenty-four, and his fifty-five. He generally called her by the play- 
ful name of " my mistress," addressed little poems to her, gave her 
solid advice, and gradually came to confide to her his miseries and 
ailments with rather surprising frankness. She flattered and 
amused him, and soothed his sufferings and did something towards 
humanising his rugged exterior. There was one little grievance 
between them which requires notice. Johnson's pet virtue in pri- 
vate life was a rigid regard for truth. He spoke, it was said of 
him, as if he was always on oath. He would not, for example, allow 
his servant to use the phrase " not at home," and even in the heat 
of conversation resisted the temptation to give point to an anecdote. 
The lively Mrs. Thrale rather fretted against the restraint, and 
Johnson admonished her 'in vain. He complained to Boswell 
that she was willing to have that said of her, which the best of 
mankind had rather died than have said of them. Boswell, the 
faithful imitator of his master in this respect, delighted in taking 
up the parable. " Now, madam, give me leave to catch you in the 
fact," he said on one occasion ; '• it was not an old woman, but an 
old man whom I Mentioned, as having told me this," and he re- 
counts his check to the "lively lady " with intense complacency. 
As may be imagined, Boswell and Mrs. Thrale did not love each 
other, in spite of the well-meant efforts of the sage to bring about 
a friendly feeling between his disciples. 

It is time to close this list of friends with the inimitable Bos- 
well. James Boswell, born in 1740, was the eldest son of a Whig 
laird and lord of sessions. He had acquired some English friends 
at the Scotch universities, among vvhom must be mentioned Mr. 
Temple, an English clerg3'man. Boswell's correspondence with 
Temple, discovered years after his death by a singular chance, and 
published in 1857, is, after the Life of Johnson, one of the most 
curious exhibitions of character in the language. Boswell was in- 
tended for the Scotch bar, and studied civil law at Utrecht in the 
winter of 1762. It was in the following summer that he made 
Johnson's acquaintance. 

Perhaps the fundamental quality in Boswell's character was his 
intense capacity for enjoyment. He was, as Mr. Carlyle puts it, 
" gluttonously fond of whatever would yieldhim a little solacement, 
were it only of a stomachic character." His love of good living and 
good drink would have made him a. hearty admirer of his country- 
rtian, Burns, had Burns been famous in Boswell's youth. Nobody 



5(5 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

could liavc joined with more thorougli abandonment in the chorus 
to tlie poet's liveliest songs in praise of love and wine. He would 
have made an excellent fourth when " Willie brewed a peck of 
malt, and Rab and Allan came to see," and the drinking contest 
for the Whistle commemorated in another lyric would have excited 
his keenest interest. He was always delighted when he could get 
Johnson to discuss the ethics and statistics of drinking. " I am 
myself," he says, " a lover of wine, therefore curious to hear what- 
ever is remarkable concerning drinking." The remark is d. propos 
to a story of Dr. Campbell drinking thirteen bottles of port at a 
sitting. Lest this should seem incredible, he quotes Johnson's 
dictum. " Sir, if a man drinks very slowly and lets one glass 
evaporate before he takes another, I know not how long he may 
drink." Boswell's faculty for making love was as great as his 
power of drinking. His letters to Temple record with amusing 
frankness the vicissitudes of some of his courtships and the versa- 
tility of his passions. 

Boswell's tastes, however, were by no means limited to sensual 
or frivolous enjoyments. His appreciation of the bottle was com- 
bined with an equally hearty sensibility to more intellectual pleas- 
ures. He had not a spark of philosophic or poetic power, but 
within the ordinary range of such topics as can be discussed at a 
dinner-party, he had an abundant share of liveliness and intelli- 
gence. His palate was as keen for good talk as for good wine. 
He was an admirable recipient, if not an originator, of shrewd or 
humorous remarks upon life and manners. What in regard to 
sensual enjoyment was mere gluttony, appeared in higher matters 
as an insatiable curiosity. At times this faculty became intolerable 
to his neighbors, " I will not be baited with what and why,-" said 
poor Johnson, one day in desperation. " Why is a cow's tail long ? 
Why is a fox's tail bushy ? " " Sir," said Johnson on another oc- 
casion, when Boswell was cross-examining a third person about 
him in his presence. " You have but two subjects, yourself and me. 
I am sick of both," Boswell, however, was not to be repelled by 
such a retort as this, or even by ruder rebuffs. Once when discus- 
sing the means of getting a friend to leave London, Johnson said in 
revenge for a previous offence. " Nay, sir, we'll send you to him. 
If your presence doesn't drive a man out of his house, nothing 
will." 'Boswell was " horribly shocked," but he still stuck to his 
victim like a leech, and pried into the minutest details of his life 
and manners. He observed with conscientious accuracy that 
though Johnson abstained from milk one fast-day, he did not reject 
it when put in his cup. He notes the whistlings and puffings, the 
trick of saying " too-too-too " of his idol : and it was a proud day 
when he won a bet by venturing to asl: Johnson what he did with 
certain scrapod bits of orange-peel. His curiosity was not satisfied 
on this occasion ; but it would have made him the prince uf i iter- 
viewers in these days. Nothing deligh.ted him so much as ruljbing 
shoulders with any famous or- notorious person. He scraped ac- 
quaintance with Voltaire, Wesley, Rouss ■ .u, and Paoli, as well as 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: ^7 

with Mrs. Rudd, a forgotten Iieroine of the N^eivgate Calendar 
He was as eager to talk to Hume the sceptic, or Wilkes the dema- 
gogue, as to the orthodox Tor)-, Johnson; and, if repelled, it was 
from no deficiency in daring. In 1767, he took advantage of his 
travels in Corsica to introduce himself to Lord Chatham, then 
Prime Minister. The letter moderately ends by asking, •' Could 
your lordsJiip fiud time io honour me now and then with a letter ? 
I have been told how favourably your lordship has spoken of me. 
To correspond with-a Paoli and with a Chatham is enough to keep 
a young man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame." No 
other young man of the day, we may be sure, would have dared to 
make such a proposal to the majestic orator. 

His absurd vanity, and the greedy craving for notoriety at any 
cost, would have made Boswell the most offensive of mortals, had 
not his unfeigned good-humour disarmed enmity. Nobody could 
help laughing, or be inclined to take offence at his harmless absur- 
dities. Burke said of him that he had so much good-humour 
naturally, that it was scarcely a virtue. His vanity, in fact, did not 
generate affectation. Most vain men are vain of qualities which 
they do not really possess, or possess in a lower degree than they 
fancy. They are always acting a part, and become touchy from a 
half-conscious sense of the imposture. But Boswell seems to have 
had few such illusions. He thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoyed 
his own peculiarities, and thought his real self much too charming 
an object to be in need of any disguise. No man, therefore, was 
ever less embarrassed by any regard for his own dignity. He was 
as ready to join in a laugh at himself as in a laugh at his neigh- 
bours. He reveals his own absurdities to the world at large as 
frankly as Pepys confided them to a journal in cypher. He tells us 
how drunk he got one night in Skye, and how he cured his head- 
ache with brandy next morning ; and what an intolerable fool he 
made of himself at an evening party in London after a dinner with 
the Duke of Montrose, and how Johnson in vain did his best to 
keep him quiet. His motive for the concession is partly the wish 
to illustrate Johnson's indulgence, and, in the last case, to introduce 
a copy of apologetic verses to the lady whose guest he had been. 
He reveals other weaknesses with equal frankness. One day, he 
says, " I owned to Johnson that I was occasionally troubled with a 
fit of narrowness." " Why, sir," said he, " so am L But I do not 
tell it.'''' Boswell enjoys the joke far too heartily to act upon th 
advice. 

There is nothing, however, which Boswell seems to have err 
joyed more heartily than his own good impulses. He looks upon 
his virtuous resolution with a sort of aesthetic satisfaction, and with 
the glow of a virtuous man contemplating a promising penitent. 
Whilst suffering severely from the consequences of imprudent con- 
duct, he gets a letter of virtuous advice from his friend Temple. 
He instantly sees himself reformed for the rest of his days. " My 
warm imaginjition," he says, " boks forward with great compla- 
cency on th^ sobriet)', he healthfulness, and worth of my future 



^8 SAMUEL J0//A'S0N: 

life." " Every instance of our doing those things wliich we ought 
not to iiave done, and leaving undone those things which we ought 
to have done, is attended," as he elsewhere sagely observes, " with 
more or less of what is truly remorse ; " but he seems rather to 
have enjoyed even the remorse. It is needless to say that the 
complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution vanished 
like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told Johnson, 
affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate sensations 
of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of dar- 
ing resolution so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest of the 
[purely hypothetical] battle." " Sir," replied Johnson, " I should 
never hear it, if it made me such a fool." Elsewhere he expresses 
a wish to "fly to the woods," or retire into a desert, a disposition 
which Johnson checked by one of his habitual gibes at the quantity 
of easily accessible desert in Scotland. Boswell is equally frank in 
describing himself in situations more provocative of contempt than 
even drunkenness in a drawing-room. He tells us how dreadfully 
frightened he was by a storm at sea in the Hebrides, and how one 
of his companions, "with a happy readiness," made him lay hold 
of a rope fastened to the masthead, and told him to pull it when 
he was ordered. Boswell was thus kept quiet in mind and harm- 
less in body. 

This extreme simplicity of character makes poor Boswell lov- 
able in his way. If he sought notoriety, he did not so far mistake 
his powers as to set up for independent notoriety.* He was con- 
tent to shine in reflected light : and the affectations with which he 
is charged seem to have been unconscious imitations of his great 
idol. Miss Burney traced some likeness even in his dress. In the 
latter part of tho. Life we meet phrases in which Boswell is evidently 
aping the true Johnsonian style. So, for example, when somebody 
distinguishes between " moral " and " physical necessity ; " Boswell 
exclaims, "Alas, sir, they come both to the same thing. You may 
be as hard bound by chains when covered by leather, as when the 
iron appears." But he specially emulates the profound melancholy 
of his hero. He seems to have taken pride in his sufferings from 
hypochondria; though, in truth, his melancholy diverges from John- 
son's by as great a difference as that which divides any two varieties 
in Jaques's classifications. Bosweli's was the melancholy of a man 
who spends too much, drinks too much, falls in love too often, and 
is forced to live in the country in dependence upon a stern old 
parent, when he is longing for a jovial life in London taverns. Still 
he was excusably vexed when Johnson refused to believe in the 
reality of his comfilaints, and showed scant sympathy to his noisy 
would-be fellow-sufferer. Some of Bosweli's freaks were, in fact, 
very trying. Once he gave up writing letters for a long time, to 
see whether Johnson would be induced to write first. Johnson be- 

* The story is often told how Boswell appeared at the Stratford Jubilee with " Corsica 
Ho^WjH " in large letters on his hat. The account given apparently by himself is suffi- 
ciently amusing, but the statement is not quite fair. Boswell not unnaturally appeared 
at a masquerade in the dress of a Corsican chief, and the inscription on his hat seems to 
have been " Viva la Liberia." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. c;g 

came anxious, thougli he half-guessed the truth, and in reference 
to Boswell's confession gave his disciple a piece of his mind. 
" Remember tliat all tricks are either knavish or childish, and tliat 
it is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend 
as upon the chastity of a wife." 

In other ways Boswell was more successful in aping his friend's 
peculiarities. When in company with Johnson, he became delight- 
fully pious. " My dear sir," he exclaimed once with unrestrained 
fervour, " I would fain be a good man, and I am very good now. I 
fear God and honour the king ; I wish to do no ill and to be benevo- 
lent to all mankind." Boswell hopes, "for the felicity of human 
nature," that many experience this mood ; though Johnson judi- 
ciously suggested that lie shomd not Jtrust too much to impressions. 
In some matters Boswell showed a touch of independence by out- 
vying the Johnsonian prejudices. He was a warm admirer of feudal 
principles, aiul especially held to the propriety of entailing property 
upon heirs male. Johnson had great difficulty in persuading him to 
yield to his father's wislies, in a settlement of the estate which con- 
travened this theory. But Boswell takes care to declare that his 
opinion was not shaken. " Yet let me not be thought," he adds, 
'• harsh or unkind to daughters ; for my notion is that they should 
be treated with great affection and tenderness, and always partici- 
pate of the prosperity of the family." His estimate of female rights 
is indicated in another phrase. When Mrs. Knowles, the Quaker, 
expressed a hope that the sexes would be equal in another world, 
Boswell replied, " That is too ambitious, madam. We might as 
well desire to be equal with the angels." Boswell, again, differed 
from Johnson — who, in spite of his love of authority, had a righteous' 
hatred for all recognised tyranny — by advocating the slave-trade. 
To abolish that trade would, he says, be robbery of the masters 
and cruelty to the African savages. Nay, he declares, to abolish it 
would be 

To shut the gates of mercy on mankind I 

Boswell was, according to Johnson, " the best travelling com- 
panion in the world." In fact, for such purposes, unfailing good- 
humour and readiness to make talk at all hazards are high recom- 
mendations. " If, sir, you were shut up in a castle and a new-born 
baby with you, what would you do ? " is one of his questions to 
Johnson, — ctfropos of nothing. That is exquisitely ludicrous, no 
doubt ; but a man capable of preferring such a remark to silence 
helps at any rate to keep the ball roUing. A more objectionable 
trick was his habit not Cinly of asking preposterous or indiscreet 
questions, but of setting people by the ears out of sheer curiosity. 
The appearance of so queer a satellite excited astonishment among 
Johnson's friends. " Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels? " 
asked some one. " He is not a cur, replied Goldsmith ; " he is 
only a bur, Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he. 
has the faculty of sticking." The bur stuck till the end of John- 
son's life. Boswell visited London whenever he could, and soon 



Co SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

began taking careful notes of Johnson's talk. His appearance 
when engaged in this task long afterwards, is described by Miss 
Burney. Boswell, she says, concentrated his whole attention upon 
his idol, not even answering questions from others. When John- 
son spoke, his eyes goggled with eagerness - he leant his ear almost 
on the Doctor's shoulder ; his mouth dropped open to catch every 
syllable ; and he seemed to listen even to Johnson's breathings as 
though they had some mystical significance. He took every op- 
portunity of edging himself close to Johnson c side even at meal- 
times, and was sometimes ordered imperiously back to his place 
like a faithful but over-obtrusive spaniel. 

It is hardly surprising that Johnson should have been touched 
by the fidelity of this queer follower. Boswell, mode^'iy enough, 
attributes Johnson's easy welcome to his interest in -ll manifesta- 
tions of the human mind, and his pleasure in an u:: isguised dis- 
play of its workings. Tlie last pleasure was certainly :o be obtained 
in Boswell's society. 1 . fact Boswell, though his qualities were 
too much those of th-; . ^ary good fellow," was not w' ' ut vir- 
tues, and still Ic2o without - jmarkable talents. He was, to - appear- 
ance, a man of really generous sympathies, and able of apprecia- 
ting proofs of a warm heart and a vigorous .idr^r mg. Foolish, 

vain, and absurd in every way, he was yet - ^.ier and more 

genuine man than many who laughed at h i. Hr singular gifts as 
an observer could onl}' escape notice from . careless or inexperi- 
enced reader. Boswell has a little ot the true Shak^perian secret. 
He lets his characters show themselves without obtruding unneces- 
sary comment. He never misses the point of "torv- tliough he 
does not ostentatiously call our attention to it. He gives just what 
is wanted to indicate character, or to explain the full meaning of a 
repartee. It is not till we compare his reports with those of less 
skilful hearers, that we can appreciate the M.;ill with which the es- 
ence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene in- 
dicated by a few telling touches. Wc are tomptjc. to lancy that we 
have heard the very thing, and rashly infer tiiat Boswell was rimply 
the mechanical transmitter of the good things uttered. Any one 
who will try to put down the pith of a brilliant conver^cvtion within 
the same space, may soon satisfy himself of the ab-urdity of such 
an hvpothesis, and will learn to appreciate BoswaL's powers not 
only of memory but artistic representation. Such a feat implies 
not only admirable quickness of appreciation, but a lare literary 
faculty. Boswell's accuracy is remarkable • but it is the least part 
of his merit. 

The book which so faithfully reflects ihe peculiaiuies of its hero 
and its author became the first specimen of a new literary type. 
Johnson himself was a master in one kina of biogi-i..])liy ; that which 
sets forth a condensed and vigorous -talement of the essentials of 
'. man's life and character. Other lLjiopj;i^-'.ers had given excellent 
memoirs (f men considered in r 'I'lon '^u the chief historical cur- 
rent-. ."- iu^ ui.r:. But a Aiil-ien^lh ;.v;rtrait of a man r, domestic 
-e with enough picturesque C<^\m\ to enable us to see him through 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 6i 

the eyes of private friendship did not exist in the language. Bos- 
well's originality and merit may be tested by comparing his book to 
the ponderous performance of Sir John Hawkins, or to the dreary 
dissertations, falsely called lives, of which Dugald Stewart's Life 
of Robertson may be taken for a type. The writer is so anxious to 
be dignified and philosophical that the despairing reader seeks in 
vain for a single vivid touch, and discovers even the main facts ol 
the hero's life by some indirect allusion. Boswell's example has 
been more or less followed by innumerable successors ; and we 
owe it in some degree to his example that we have such delightful 
books as Lockhart's Life of Scott or Mr. Trevelyan's Life oj 
Macaulay. Yet no later biographer has been quite as fortunate 
in a subject ; and Boswell remains as not only the first, but the 
best of his class. 

One special merit implies something like genius. Macaulay 
has given to the usual compliant which distorts the vision of most 
biographers the name of lues Boswelliana. It is true that Bos- 
well's adoration of his hero is a typical example of the feeling. 
But that which distinguishes Boswell, and renders the phrase un- 
just, is ^,hat in him adoration never hindered accuracy of portrait- 
ure. • " I will not make my tigei; a cat to please anybody," was his 
answer to well-meaning entreaties of Hannah More to soften his 
accounts of Johnson's asperities. He saw instinctively that a man 
who is worth anything loses far more than he gains by such pos- 
thumous flatter". The whole picture is toned down, and the lights 
are depressed as well as the shadows. The truth is that it is urf- 
scientific to consider a man as a bundle of separate good and bad 
qualities, of which one half may be concealed without injury to 
the rest. Johnson's fits of bad temper, like Goldsmith's blunder- 
ing, must be unsparingly revealed by a biographer, because they are 
in fact expressions of the whole character. It is necessary to take 
them into account in order really to understand either the merits 
or the shortcomings. When they are softened or omitted, the 
whole story becomes an enigma, and we are often tempted to sub- 
stitute some less creditable explanation of errors for the true one. 
We should not do justice to Johnson's intense tenderness, if we 
did not see how often it was masked by an irrita'oility pardonable in 
itself, and not affecting the deeper springs of action. To bring 
out the beauty of a character by means of its external oddities is 
the triumph of a kindly humourist ; and Boswell would have acted 
as absurdly in suppressing Johnson's weaknesses, as Sterne would 
have done had he made Uncle Toby a perfectly sound and rational 
person. But to see this required an insight so rare that it is 
wanting in nearly all the biographers who have followed Boswell's 
steps, and is the most conclusive proof that Boswell was a man of 
a higher intellectual capacity than has been generally admitted. 



62 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 



CH/VPTER TV- 

JOHNSON AS A LITERARY DICTATOR. 

We have now reached the point at which Johnson's life becomes 
distinctly visible through the eyes of a competent observer. The 
last twenty years are those which are really familiar to us ; and 
little remains but to give some brief selection of Boswell's anecdotes. 
The task, however, is a difficult one. It is easy enough to make a 
selection of the gems of Boswell's narrative ; but it is also inevi- 
table that, taken from their setting, they should lose the greatest 
part of their briUiance. We lose all the quaint semi-conscious 
touches of character which make the original so fascinating ; and 
Boswell's absurdities become less amusing when we are able to 
forget for an instant that the perpetrator is also the narrator. The 
•effort, however, must be made; and it will be best to premise a 
brief statement of the external conditions of the life. 

From the time of the pension until his death, Johnson was eleva- 
ted above the fear of poverty. He had a pleasant refuge at the 
Thrales', where much of his time was spent ; and many friends 
gathered round him and regarded his utterances with even excessive 
admiration. He had still frequent periods of profound depression. 
His diaries reveal an inner life tormented by gloomy forebodings, 
by remorse for past indolence and futile resolutions of amendment; 
but he could always escape from himself to a society of friends and 
admirers. His abandonment of wine seems to have improved his 
health and diminished the intensity of his melancholy fits. His 
literary activity, however, nearly ceased. He wrote a few political 
pamphlets in defence of Government, and after a long period of 
indolence managed to complete his last conspicuous work — \\-\& Lives 
of the Poets, wh'xchw'^?, published in 1779 and 1781. One other book 
of some interest appeared in 1 775. It was an account of the journey 
made with Boswell to the Hebribes in 1773. This journey was 
in fact the chief interruption to the even tenour of his life. He made 
a tour to Wales with the Thrales in 1774 ; and sp^ent a month with 
them in Paris in 1775. For the rest of the period he lived chiefly 
in London or at Streatham, making occasional trips to Lichfield and 
Oxford, or paying visits to Taylor, Langton, and one or two other 
friends. It was, however, in the London which he loved, so ar- 
dently ( "a man," he said once, "who is tired of London is tired of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 63 

life "), that he was chiefly conspicuiaus. Tliere he talked and drank 
tea inimitably at his friends' houses, or argued and laid down the law 
to his disciples collected in a tavern instead of Academic groves. 
Especially he was in all his glory at the Club, which began its meet- 
ings in February, 1764, and was afterwards known as the Literary 
Club. This Club was founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds, " our Rom- 
ulus," as Johnson called him. The original members were Rey- 
nolds, Johnson, Burke, Nugent, Beauclerk, Langton, Goldsmith, 
Chamier, and Hawkins. They meet weekly at the Turk's Head, 
in Gerard Street, Soho, at seven o'clock, and the talk generally 
continued till a late hour. The Club was afterwards increased in 
numbers, and the weekly supper changed to a fortnightly dinner. 
It continued to thrive, and election to it came to be as great an 
honour in certain circles as election to a membership of Parliament. 
Among the members elected in Johnson's lifetime were Percy of 
the Rc'Iiqjics, Garrick, Sir W. Jones, Boswell, Fox, Steevens, 
Gibbon, Adam Smith, the Wartons, Sheridan, Dunning, Sir Joseph 
Banks, Windham, Lord Stowell, Malone, and Dr. Burney. What 
was best in the conversation at the time was doubtless to be found 
at its meetings. 

Johnson's habitual mode of life is described by Dr. Maxwell, 
one of Bos well's friends, who made his acquaintance in 1754. 
Maxwell generally called upon him about twelve, and found him in 
bed or declaiming over his tea. A levee, chiefly of literary men, 
surrounded him ; and he seemed to be regarded as a kind of oracle 
to whom every one might resort for advice or instruction. After 
talking all the morning, he dined at a tavern, staying late and then 
going to some friend's house for tea, over which he again loitered 
for a long time. Maxwell is puzzled to know when he could have 
read or written. The answer seems to be pretty obvious ; namely, 
that after the publication of the Dictionary he wrote very little, 
and that, when he did write, it was generally in a brief spasm of 
feverish energy. One may understand that Johnson should have 
frequently reproached himself for his indolence ; though he seems 
to have occasionally comforted himself by thinking that he could do 
good by talking as well as by writing. He said that a man should 
have a part of his life to himself ; and. compared himself to a phy- 
sician retired to a small town from practice in a great city. Bos- 
well, in spite of this, said that he still wondered that Johnson had 
not more pleasure in writing than in not writing. " Sir," rephed 
the oracle, " you may wonder." 

I will now endeavour, with Boswell's guidance, to describe a 
few of the characteristic scenes which can be fully enjoyed in his 
pages alone. The first must be the introduction of Boswell to the 
sage. Boswell had come to London eager for the acquaintance of 
literary magnates. He already knew Goldsmith, who had inflamed 
his desire for an introduction to Johnson. Once when Boswell 
spoke of Levett, one of Johnson's dependents, Goldsmith had said, 
" he is poor and honest, which is recommendation enough to John- 
son." Another time, when Boswell had wondered at Johnson's 



64 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

kindness to a man of bad charactfer, Goldsmith had replied, " He is 
now become miserable, and that insures the protection of Johnson." 
Boswell had hoped for an introduction through the elder Slieridan ; 
but Sheridan never forgot the contemptuous phrase in which John- 
son had referred to his fellow-pensioner. Possibly Sheridan had 
heard of one other Johnsonian remark. " Why, sir," he had said, 
" Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great 
deal of pains to become what We now see him. Such an excess of 
stupidity, sir, is not in Nature." At another time he said, "Sheri- 
dan cannot bear me ; I bring his declamation to a point." " What 
influence can Mr. Sheridan have upon the language of this great 
country by his narrow exertions ? Sir, it is burning a farthing 
candle at Dover to show light at Calais." Boswell, however, was 
acquainted with Davies, an actor turned bookseller, now chiefly 
remembered by a line in Churclihill's Rosciad which is said to' 
have driven him from the stage -r— 

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone. 

Boswell was drinking tea with Davies and his wife in their back 
parlour when Johnson came into the shop. Davies, seeing him 
through the glass-door, announced his approach to Boswell in the 
spirit of Horatio addressing Hamlet : " Look, my Lord, it comes ! " 
Davies introduced the young Scotchman, who remembered John- 
son's proverbial prejudices. " Don't tell him where I come from ! " 
cried Boswell. "From Scotland," said Davies roguishly. "Mr. 
Johnson," said Boswell, " I do indeed come from Scotland; but I 
cannot help it ! " " That, sir," was the first of Johnson's many 
retorts to his worshipper, " is what a great many of your country- 
men cannot help." 

Poor Boswell was stunned ; but he recovered when Johnson 
observed to Davies, " What do you think of Garrick ? He lias 
refused me an order for the play for Miss Williams because he 
knows the house will be full, and that an order would be worth 
three shillings." " O, sir," intruded the unlucky Boswell, " I can- 
not think Mn Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you." " Sir," 
replied Johnson sternly, " I have known David Garrick longer 
than you iiave done, and I know no right you have to talk to me 
on the subject." The second blow might have crushed a less in- 
trepid curiosity. Boswell, though silenced, gradually recovered 
sufficiently to listen, and afterwards to note down parts of the con- 
versation. As the interview went on, he even ventured to make 
a remark or two, which were very civilly received ; Davies consoled 
him at his departure by assuring him that the great man liked him 
very well. " I cannot conceive a more humiliating position," said 
Beauclerk on another occasion, "than to be clapped on the back 
by Tom Davies." For the present, however, even Tom Davies 
was a welcome encourage r to one who, for the rest, was not easily 
rebuffed. A few days afterwards Boswell ventured a call, was 
kindly received and detained for some time by " the giant in his 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 65 

den." He was still a little afraid of the said giant, who had shortly 
before administered a vigorous retort to his countryman Blair. 
Blair had asked" Johnson whether he thought that any man of a 
modern age could have written Ossian. " Yes, sir," replied John- 
son, "many men, many women, and many children." Boswell, 
however, got on very well, and before long had the high honour of 
drinking a bottle of port with Johnson at the iVIitre, and receiving, 
after a httle autobiographical sketch, the emphatic approval, "Give 
me your hand, I have taken a liking to you." 

In a very short time Boswell was on sufficiently easy terms with 
Johnson, not merely to frequent his levees but to ask him to dinner 
at the Mitre. He gathered up, though witliout the skill of his later 
performances, some fragments of the conversational feast. The 
great man aimed another blow or two at Scotch prejudices. To 
an unlucky compatriot of Boswell's, who claimed for his country a 
great many "noble wild prospects," Johnson replied, "I believe, 
sir, you have a great many, Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; 
and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. 
But, sir, let me tell you the ri.oblest prospect which a Scotchman 
ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England." Though 
Boswell makes a slight remonstrance about the " rude grandeur of 
Nature " as seen in " Caledonia," he sympathized in this with his 
teacher. Johnson said afterwards, that he never knew any one 
with " such a gust for London." Before long he was trying Bos- 
well's tastes by asking him in Greenwich Park, "Is not this very 
fine?" "Yes, sir," replied the promising disciple, "but not equal 
to Fleet Street." "You are right, sir," said the sage; and Bos- 
well illustrates his dictum by the authority of a " very fashionable 
baronet," and, moreover, a baronet from Rydal, who declared that 
the fragrance of a May evening in the country might be very well, 
but that he preferred the smell o: a llimbeau at the playhouse. In 
mere serious moods Johnson delighted his new disciple by discus- 
sions upon theological, social, and literary topics. He argued with 
an unfortunate friend of Boswell's, whose mind, it appears, had 
been poisoned by Hume, and who was, moreover, rash enough to 
undertake the defence of principles of political equality. Johnson's 
view of all propagators of new opinions was tolerably simple. 
'• Hume, and other sceptical innovators," he said, "are vain men, 
and will gratify themselves at any expense. Truth will not afford 
sufficient food to their vanity ; so they have betaken themselves to 
error. Truth, sir. is a cow which will yield such peopk no more 
milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull." On another occasion 
poor Boswell. not yet acquainted with the master's prejudices, 
quoted with hearty laughter a "very strange " story which Hume 
had told him of Johnson. According to Hume, Johnson had said 
that he would stand before a battery of cannon to restore Convo- 
cation to its full powers. "And would 1 not, sir ?" thundered out 
the sage with flashing eyes and threatening gestures. Boswell 
judiciously bowed to the storm, and diverted Johnson's attention. 
Another manifestation of orthodox preiudice was less terrible. 

5 



66 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Boswell told Johnson that he had heard a Quaker woman preach, 
"A woman's preaching," said Johnson, "is hke a dog's walking on 
his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to rind 
it done at all." 

So friendly had the pair become, that when Boswell left Eng- 
land to continue his studies at Utrecht, Johnson accompanied him 
in the stage-coach to Harwich, amusing him on the way by his 
frankness of address to fellow-passengers, and by the voracity of 
his appetite. He gave him some excellent advice, remarking of a 
moth which fluttered into a candle, " that creature was its own tor- 
mentor, and I believe its name was Boswell." He refuted Berke- 
ley by striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till 
he rebounded from it. As the ship put out to sea Boswell watched 
him from the deck, whilst he remained '* rolling his majestic frame 
in his usual manner." And so the friendship was cemented, 
though Boswell disappeared for a time from the scene, travelled on 
the Continent, and visited Paoli in Corsica. A friendly letter or 
two kept up the connexion till Boswell returned in 1766, with his 
head full of Corsica and a projected book pf travels. 

In the next year, 1767, occurred an incident upon which Bos- 
well dwells with extreme complacency. Johnson was in the habit 
of sometimes reading in the King's Library, and it came into the 
head of his majesty that he should like to see the uncouth monster 
upon whom he had bestowed a pension. In spite of his semi- 
humorous Jacobitism, there was probably not a more loyal subject 
in his majesty's dominions. Loyalty is a word too often used to 
designate a sentiment worthy only of valets, advertising trades- 
men, and writers of claptrap articles. But it deserves all respect 
when it reposes, as in Johnson's case, upon a profound conviction 
of the value of political subordination, and an acceptance of the 
king as the authorised representative of a great principle. There 
was no touch of servility in Johnson's respect for his sovereign, a 
respect fully reconcilable with a sense of his own personal dignity. 
Johnson spoke of his interview with an unfeigned satisfaction, 
which it would be difficult in these days to preserve from the taint 
of snobbishness. He described it frequently to his friends, and 
Boswell with pious care ascertained the details from Johnson him- 
self, and from various secondary sources. He contrived afterwards 
to get his minute submitted to the King himself, who graciously 
autliorised its publication. When lie was preparing his biography, 
he published this account with the letter to Chesterfield in a small 
pamphlet sold at a prohibitory price, in order to secure the copy- 
right. 

" 1 find," said Johnson afterwards, " that it does a man good to 
be talked to by his sovereign. In the first place a man cannot be 
in a passion." Wnat other advantages he perceived must be un- 
known, tor here the oracle was interrupted, ^ut whatever the ad- 
vantages, it could nardly be reckoned amongst them, that there 
wouM he room for the hearty cut and tlirust retorts which enlivened 
his ordinary talk. To us accordingly the conversation is chiefly 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 67 

interesting as illustrating what Johnson meant by his politeness. 
He found that the King wanted him to talk, and he talked accord- 
ingly. He spoke in a "tirm manly manner, with a sonorous voice," 
and not in the subdued tone customary at formal receptions. He 
dilated upon various literary topics, on the libraries of Oxford and 
Cambridge, on some contemporary controversies, on the quack 
Dr. Hill, and upon the reviews of the day. All that is worth re- 
peating is a complimentary passage which shows Johnson's pos- 
session of that courtesy which rests upon sense and self-respect. 
The King asked whether he was writing anything, and Johnson 
excused himself by saying that he had told the world what he knew 
for the present, and had ''done his part as a writer." " I should 
have thought so too," said the King, " if you had not written so 
well." "No man," said Johnson, "could have paid a higher com- 
pliment ; and it was fit for a King to pay — it was decisive." When 
asked if he had replied, he said, " No, sir. When the Ki-ng had 
said it, it was to be. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my 
sovereign." Johnson was not the less delighted. " Sir," he said 
to the librarian, "they may talk of the King as they will, but he is 
the finest gentleman I have ever seen." And he afterwards com- 
pared his manners to those of Louis XIV., and his favourite, 
Charles II. Goldsmith, says Boswell, was silent during the narra- 
tive, because (so his kind friend supposed) he was jealous of the 
honour paid. to the dictator. But his natural simplicity prevailed. 
He ran to Johnson, and exclaimed in 'a kind of flutter,' "Well, 
you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should 
have done, for I should have bowed and stam.mered through the 
whole of it." 

The years 1768 and 1769 were a period of great excitement for 
Boswell. He was carrying on various love affairs, which ended 
with his marriage in the end of 1769. He was publishing his book 
upon Corsica and paying homage to Paoli. who arrived in England 
in the autumn of the same year. The book appeared in the begin- 
ning of 1768, and he begs his friend Temple to report all that is 
said about it, but with the restriction that he is to conceal all cen- 
sure. He particularly wanted Gray's opinion, as Gray was a friend 
of Temple's. Gray's opinion, not conveyed to Boswell, was ex- 
pressed by his calling it " a dialogue between a green goose and a 
hero." Boswell, who was cultivating the society of various eminent 
people, exclaims triumphantly in a letter to Temple (April 26, 1768), 
" I am really tlie great man now." Johnson and Hume had called 
upon him on the same day, and Garrick, Franklin, and Oglethorpe 
also partook of his " admirable dinners and good clnret." " This,'' 
he says, with the sense that he deserved his honours, " is cnjoving 
the fruit of my labours, and appearing like tiie fnend of Paoli." 
Johnson in vain expressed a wish liiat he would "empty his head 
of Corsica, which had filled it too long." "Empty my head of 
Corsica! Empty it of honour, empty it of friendship, empty it of 
piety!" exclaims the ardent vouth. The next year accordingly 
saw Boswell's appearance at the Stratford Jubilee, where he pa- 



68 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

raded to the admiration of all beholders in a costume described by 
himself (apparently) in a glowing article in the London Magazine. 
" Is it wrong, sir," he took speedy opportunity of inquiring from 
the oracle, " to affect singularity in order to make people stare ? " 
" Yes," replied Johnson, " if you do it by propagating error, and 
indeed it is wrong in any way. There is in human nature ageneral 
inclination to make people stare, and every wise man has himself 
to cure of it, and does cure himself. If you wish to make people 
stare by doing better than others, why make them stare till they 
stare their eyes out. But consider how easy it is to make people 
stare by being absurd " — a proposition which he proceeds to illus- 
trate by examples perhaps less telling than Boswell's recent per- 
formance. 

The sage was less communicative on the question of marriage, 
though Boswell had anticipated some '' instructive conversation " 
upon that topic. His sole remark was one from which Boswell 
" humbly differed." Johnson mamtained that a wife was not the 
worse for being learned. Boswell, on the other hand, defined the 
proper degree of intelligence to be desired in a female companion 
by some verses in which Sir Thomas Overbury says that a wife 
should have some knowledge, and be " by nature wise, not learned 
much by art." Johnson said afterwards that Mrs. Boswell was 
in a proper degree inferior to her husband. So far as we can tell, 
she seems to have been a really sensible and good woman, who 
kept her husband's absurdities in check, and was, in her way, a 
better wife than he deserved. So, happily, are most wives. 

Johnson and Boswell had several meetings in 1769. Boswell 
had the honour of introducing the two objects of his idolatry, 
Johnson and Paoli, and on another occasion entertained a party 
including Goldsmith and Garrick and Reynolds, at his lodgings in 
Old Bond Street. We can still see the meeting more distinctly 
than many that have been swallowed by a few days of oblivion. 
They waited for one of the party, Johnson kindly maintaining that 
si.x ought to be kept waiting for one, if the one would suffer more 
by the others sitting d'^wn than the six by waiting. Meanwhile 
Garrick " played round Johnson with a fond vivacity, taking hold 
of the breasts of his coat, looking up in his face with a lively arch- 
ness," and complimenting him on his good health. Goldsmith 
strutted about bragging of his dress, of which Boswell, in the 
serene consciousness of superiority to such weakness, thought him 
seriously vain. " Let me tell you," said Goldsmith, " when my 
tailor brought home my bloom-coloured coat, he said, ' Sir, I have 
n favour to beg of you ; when anybody asks 3'ou who made your 
clothes, l)e pleased to mentivin John Filby, at the Harrow, Water 
Lane.' " " Why, sir," said Johnson, " that was because he knew 
that the strange colour would attract crowds to gaze at it, and- thus 
they might hear of him, and see how well he could make a coat 
even of so absurd a colour." Mr. Filby has gone the way of all 
tailors and bloom-coloured coats, but some of his bills are pre- 
tjerved. On the day of this dinner he had -delivered to Goldsmith 



SAMUEL JOHNSOAT. 69 

a half-dress suit of ratteen lined with satin, costing twelve guineas, 
a pair of silk stocking-breeches for £2 ^s. and a pair of bloom- 
coloured ditto for £1 ^s. (mI. Tlie bill, including other items, was 
paid, it is satisfactory to add, in February, 1771. 

The conversation was chiefly literary. Johnson repeated the 
concluding lines of the Dmiciad j upon «vhich some one (probably 
Boswell) ventured to say that they were " too fine for such a poem 
— a poem on what?" "Why," said Johnson, " on dunces! It 
was worth while being a dunce then. Ah, sir, hadst tlioii lived in 
those days ! " Johnson previously uttered a criticism which has led 
some people to think that he had a touch of the dunce in him. He 
declared that a description of a temple in Congreve's Mourning 
Bride \\?iS, the finest he knew — finer than anything in Shakspeare. 
Garrick vainly protested ; but Johnson was inexorable. He com- 
pared CoBgreve to a man who had only ten guineas in the world, 
but all in one coin ; whereas Shakspeare might have ten thousand 
separate guineas. The principle of the criticism is rather curious. 
" What I mean is," said Johnson, " that you can show me no pas- 
sage where there is simply a description of material objects, with- 
out any admixture of moral notions, which produc&s such an 
effect." The description of the night before Agincourt was rejected 
because there were men in it; and the description of Dover Cliff 
because the boats and the crows •' impede yon fall." They do 
'■not impress your mind at once with the horrible idea of immense 
height. The impression is divided ; you pass on by computation 
from one stage of the tremendous space to another." 

Probably most people will tliink that the passage in question 
deserves a very slight fraction of the praise bestowed upon it; but 
the criticism, like most of Johnson's, has a meaning which might 
be worth examining abstractedly from the special application which 
shocks the idolaters of Shakspeare. Presently the party discussed 
Mrs. Montagu, whose Essay upon Shakspeare had made some 
noise. Johnson had a respect for her, caused in great measure by 
a sense of her liberality to his friend Miss Williams, of whom more 
must be said hereafter. He paid her some tremendous compliments, 
observing that some China plates which had belonged to Queen 
Elizabeth and to her, had no reason to be ashamed of a possessor 
so little inferior to the first. But he had his usual professional 
contempt for her amateur performances in literature.* Her defence 
of Shakspeare a2;ainst Voltaire did her honour, he admitted, but 
it would do nobody else honour. " No, sir, there is no real 
criticism in it : none showing the beauty of thought, as formed on 
the workings of the human heart." Mrs. Montagu was reported 
once to have complimented a modern tragedian, probably Jephson, 
by saying," I tremble for Shakspeare." "When Shakspeare," said 
Johnson, " has got Jephson for his rival and Mrs. Montagu for his 
defender, he is in a poor state indeed." The conversation went 
on to a recently published book, Kauics's Elements of Criticism, 
which Johnson praised, whilst Goldsmith said more truly, " It is 
easier to write that book than to read it," Johnson went on to 



yo SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

speak of other critics. "There is no great merit," he said " in 
telling how many plays have ghosts in them, and how this ghost is 
better than that. You must show how terror is impressed on the 
human heart. In the description of night in Macbeth the beetle 
and the bat detract from the general idea of darkness — inspissated 
gloom." 

After Boswell's marriage he disappeared for some time from 
London, and his correspondence with Johnson dropped, as he says, 
without coldness, from pure procrastination. He did not return 
to London till 1772. In the spring of that and the following year 
he renewed his old habits of intimacy, and inquired into Johnson's 
opinion upon various subjects ranging from ghosts to literary 
criticism. The height to which he had risen in the doctor's good 
opinion was markecl by several symptoms. He was asked to dine 
at Johnson's house upon Easter day, 1773 ; and observes that his 
curiosity was as much gratified as iDy a previous dinner with 
Rousseau in the " wilds of Neufchatel." He was now able to report, 
to the amazement of many inquirers, that Johnson's establishment 
was quite orderly. The meal consisted of very good soup, a boiled 
leg of lamb with spinach, a veal pie, and a rice pudding. A 
stronger testimony of good-will was his election, by Johnson's 
influence, into the Club. It ought apparently to be said that 
Johnson forced him upon the Club by letting it be understood that, 
till ISoswell was admitted, no other candidate would have a chance. 
BoswelJ, however, was, as his proposer said, a thoroughly '• clubable " 
man, and once a member, his good humor secured his p pularity. 
On the important evening Boswell dined at Beauclerk's with his 
proposer and some othermembers. The talk turned upon Gold- 
smith's merits ; and Johnson not only defended his poetry, but 
preferred him as a historian to Robertson. Such a judgment 
could be explained in Boswell's opinion by nothing but Johnson's 
dislike to the Scotch. Once before, when Boswell had mentioned 
Robertson in order to meet Johnson's condemnation of Scotch 
literature in general, Johnson had evaded him ; " Sir, I love 
Robertson, and I won't talk of his book." On the present occasion 
he said that he would give to Robertson the advise offered by an 
old college tutor to a pupil ; " read over your compositions, and 
whenever you meet with a passage which you think p.irticularly 
fine, strike it. out." A good anecdote of Goldsmith followed. 
Johnson had said to him once in the Poet's Corner at Westmin- 
ster, — 

Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis. 

When they got to Temple Bar Goldsmith pointed to the heads of 
the Jacobites upon it and slily suggested, — 

P^jrsitan et nostrum nonicn miscebitur istis. 

Johnson next ])ronounced a critical Judsiment which should be 
set against many sins of that kind. He praised the Pilgrim's Pro- 



SAMUEL fOHNSON: 71 

gress very warmly, and suggested that Banyan had probably read 
Spenser. 

After more talk the gentlemen went to the Club ; and poor Bos- 
well remained trembling with an anxiety which even the charms of 
Lady Di Beauclerk's conversation could not dissipate. The wel- 
come news of his election was brought ; and Boswell went to see 
Burke for the first time, and to receive a humorous charge from 
Johnson, pointing out the conduct expected from him as a good 
member. Perhaps some hints were given as to betrayal of confi- 
dence. Boswell seems at any rate to have had a certain reserve 
in repeating Club talk. 

This intimacy with Johnson was about to receive a more public 
and even more impressive stamp. The antipathy to Scotland and 
the Scotch already noticed was one of Johnson's most notorious 
crotchets. The origin of the prejudice was forgotten by Johnson 
himself, though he was willing to accept a theory started by old 
Sheridan that it was resentment for the betrayal of Charles I. 
There is, however, nothing surprising in Johnson's partaking a prej. 
udice common enough from the days of his youth, when each peo- 
ple supposed itself to have been cheated by the Union, and En- 
glishmen resented the advent of swarms of needy adventurers, talk- 
ing with a strange accent and hanging together with honourable but 
vexatious persistence. Johnson was irritated by what was, after 
all, a natural defence against English prejudice. He declared that 
the Scotch were always ready to lie on each other's behalf. " The 
Irish," he said, " are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by 
false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, sir, 
the Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another." 
There was another difference. He always expressed a generous 
resentment against the tyranny exercised by English rulers over 
the Irish people. To some one who defended the restriction of 
Irish trade for the good of English merchants, he said, " Sir, you 
talk the language of a savage. What ! sir, would you prevent any peo- 
ple from feeding themselves, if by any honest means they can do 
it ? " It was " better to h'ang or drown people at once," than weaken 
them by unrelenting persecution. He felt some tenderness far 
Catholics, especially when oppressed, and a hearty antipathy to- 
wards prosperous Presbyterians. The Lowland Scotch were typi- 
fied by John Knox, in regard to whom he expressed a hope, after 
viewing the ruins of St. Andrew's, that he was buried "in the high- 
way." 

This sturdy British and High Church prejudice did not pre- 
vent the worthy doctor from having many warm friendships with 
Scotchmen, and helping many distressed Scotchmen in London. 
Most of the amanuenses employed for his Dictio)iary were Scotch. 
But he nourished the prejudice the more as giving an excellent 
pretext for many keen giloes. " Scotch learning," he said, for ex- 
ample, " is Jike bread in a besieged town. Every man gets a mouth- 
ful, but no man a bellyful." Once Strahan said in answer to some 
abusive remarks, " Well, sir, God made Scotland." '• Certainly,' 



7 2 SAMUEL JO HA SO. V. 

replied Johnson, " but we must always remember that He made it 
for Scotchmen; and comparisons are odious, Mr. Strahan, but God 
made hell." 

Boswell, therefore, had reason to feel both triumph and alarm 
when lie induced tlie great man to accompany him in a Scotch, 
tour. Boswell's journal of the tour appeared soon after Johnson's 
death. Johnson himself wrote an account of it, which is not with- 
out interest, though it is in his dignified style, which does not con- 
descend to Boswellian touches of character. In 1773 the Scotch 
Highlands were still a little known region, justifying a book descrip- 
tive of manners and customs, and touching upon antiquities now 
the commonplaces of innumerable guide books. Scott was still an 
infant, and the day of enthusiasm, real or affected, for mountain 
scenery had not yet dawned. Neither of the travellers, as Bos- 
well remarks, cared much for '" rural beauties." Johnson says 
cpiaintly on the shores of Loch Ness, "It will very readily occur 
that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement 
to the traveller ; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks 
a-ad heath and waterfalls : and that these journeys are useless la- 
bours, which neither impregnate the imagination nor enlarge the 
understanding." And though he shortly afterwards sits down on 
a l)ank "such as a writer of romance might have delighted to 
feign," and there conceived the thought of his book, he does not 
seem to have felt much enthusiasm. He checked Boswell for de- 
scribing a hill as " immense," and told him that it was only a 
" considerable protuberance." Indeed it is not surprising it he 
sometimes grew weary in long rides upon Highland ponies, or if, 
when weatherbound in a remote village in Skye, he declared that 
this was a "waste of life." 

On the whole, however, Johnson bore his fatigues well, preserved 
his temper, and made sensible remarks upon. men and things. The 
pair started from Edinburgh in the middle of August, 1773; they 
went north along the eastern coast, through St. Andrew's, Aberdeen, 
Banff, Fort George, and Inverness. Th.ere they took to horses, 
rode to Glenelg, and took boat for Skye, where they landed on the 
2nd of September. They visited Rothsay, Col, Mull, and lona, 
and after some dangerous sailing sjot to the mainland at Oban on 
October 2nd. Thence they proceeded by Inverarv and Loch Lo- 
mond to Glasgow ; and after paying a visit to Boswell's paternal 
mansion at Auchinleck in Ayrshire, returned to Edinburgh in Nov- 
ember. It were too long to narrate their adventures at length, or 
to describe in detail how Johnson grieved over traces of the icono- 
clastic zeal of Knox's disciples, seriously investigated stories of 
second-sight, cross-examined and brow-beat credulous believers in 
the authenticity of Ossian, and felt his jjiety grow warm among the 
ruins of lona. Once or twice, when tlie temper of the travellers 
was tried by the various worries incident to their position, poor 
Boswell came in for some severe blows. But he was happy, feel- 
ing, as he remarks, like a dog who has run away with a large piece 
of meat, and is devouring it peacefully in a corner by himself. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 73 

Boswell's spirits were irrepressible. On hearing a drum beat for 
dinner at Fort George, he says, with a Pepys-like touch, " I for a 
little while fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me." He 
got scandalously drunk on one occasion, and showed reprehensible 
levity on others. He bored Johnson by inquiring too curiously 
into his reasons for not wearing a nightcap — a subject which seems 
to have interested him profoundly ; he permitted himself to say in 
his journal that he was so much pleased with some pretty ladies' 
maids at the Duke of Argyll's, that he felt he could " have been a 
knight-errant for them," and his " venerable fellow-traveller " read 
the passage without censuring his levity. The great man himself 
could be equally volatile. "I have often thotight,'" he observed 
one day, to Boswell's amusement, " that if I kept a seraglio, the 
ladies should all wear linen gowns " — as more cleanly. The pair 
agreed in trying to stimulate the feudal zeal of various Highland 
chiefs with whom they came in contact, and who were unreasonable 
enough to show a hankering after the luxuries of civilisation. 

Though Johnson seems to have been generally on his best be- 
haviour, he had a rough encounter or two with some of the more 
civilised natives. Boswell piloted him safely through a visit to 
Lord Monboddo, a man of real ability, though the proprietor of 
crochets as eccentric as Johnson's, and consequently divided from 
him by strong mutual prejudices. At Auchinleck he was less 
fov:.v;.;,:e. • The old laird, who was the staunchest of Whigs, had 
r-jt relished his son's hero-worship. " There is nae hope for Jamie, 
iv.or ; Jamie is gaen clean gyte. Wliat do you think, mon .? He's 
lioue vvi' Paoli — he's off wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, 
and who's tail do you think he's pinned himself to now, mon ? " 
'' Here," says Sir Walter Scott, the authority for the story, " the 
old judge r'immoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. ' A 
domiui?, -jn — an auld dominie — he keeped a schule and caauld it 
an ncaademy.-' " The two managed to keep the peace till, one day 
during Johnson's visit, they got upon Oliver Cromwell. Boswell 
suppresses the scene with obvious reluctance, his openness being 
checked for once by filial respect. Scott has fortunately preserved 
the climsx of Old Boswell's argument. " What had Cromwell done 
for hj j Cf'untry ? " asked Johnson. " God, doctor, he gart Kings 
ken thp/' .hey had ■A.lith in their necks " retorted the laird, in a 
phrase worthy of Mr. Carlyle himself. Scott reports one other 
scene, at which respectable commentators, like Croker, hold \\\) 
their hands in horror. Should we regret or rejoice to say that if 
involves an obvious inaccuracy ? The authority, however, is too 
good to allow us to suppose that it was without some foundation. 
Adam Smith, it is said, met Johnson at Glasgow and had aii aru^r- 
cation with him about the well-known account of Hume's dearh. 
As Hume did not die till three years later, there must be some 
er#)r in this. The dispute, however, whatever its date or subject, 
ended by Johnson saying to Smith, " K??^ //>." "And what did 

you reply? " was asked of Smith. " I said 'you are a son of a .'" 

" On such terms," says Scott, did these two great moralists meet 



74 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

and part, ana such was the classical dialogue between these two 
great teachers of moralit}'." 

In the year 1774 Boswell found it expedient to alone for his 
long absence -in the previous year by staying at home. Johnson 
managed to complete his account of the Scotch 7 our, which was 
published at the end of (ho year. Among other consequences was 
a violent controversy with the lovers of Ossian. Johnson was a 
thorough sceptic as to th authenticity of the book. His scepticism 
did not repose upon the philological or antiquarian reasonings, 
which would be applicable in tlie controversy from internal evi- 
dence. It was to some extent the expression of a general incredu- 
lity which astonished his friends, especially when contrasted with 
his tenderness for many puerile superstitions. He could scarcely 
be induced to admit the truth of any narrative which struck him as 
odd, and it was long, for example, before he would believe even in 
the Lisbon earthqu'ake. Yet he seriously discussed the truth of 
second-sight ; he carefully investigated the Cock-lane ghost — a 
goblin who anticipated some of the modern phenomena of so-called 
" spiritualism," and with almost equal absurdity ; he told stories to 
Boswell about a *' shadowy being " which had once been seen by 
Cave, and declared that he had once heard his mother call " Sam " 
when he was at Oxford and she at Lichfield. The apparent incon- 
sistency was in truth natural enough. Any man who clings with 
unreasonable pertinacity to the prejudices of his childhood, must 
be alternately credulous and sceptical in excess. In both cases, 
he judges by his fancies in defiance of evidence ; and accepts and 
rejects according to his likes and dislikes, instead of his estimates 
of logical proof, . Ossian would be naturally offensive to Johnson, 
as one of the earliest and most remarkable manifestations of that 
growing taste for what was called " Nature," as opposed to civilisa- 
tion, of which Rousseau was the great mouthpiece. Nobody more 
heartily despised this form of " cant" than Johnson. A man who 
utterly despised the scenery of the Hebrides as compared with 
Greenwich Park or Charing Cross, would hardly take kindly to the 
Ossianesque version of the mountain passion. The book struck 
him as sheer rubbish. I have already quoted the retort about 
"many men, many women, and many children." "A man," he 
said, on another occasion, " might write such stuff for ever, if he 
would abandon his mind to it." 

The precise point, however, upon which he rested his case, was 
the tangible one of the inability' of Macpherson to produce the man- 
uscripts of which he had af^rmed the existence. Macpherson 
wrote a furious letter to Johnson, of which the purport can only be 
inferred from Johnson's smashing retort, — 

"Mr. James MacPherson, I have received your foolish and im- 
pudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my i)est to re- 
pel ; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me# I 
hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat 
by the menaces of a ruffian. 

" What would you have me retract ? I thought your book ao 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: y^ 

^Pimposture : I think it an imposture still. Y ox this opinion I have 
W given my reasons to the public, which I here dare you to refute. 
I Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since /our Homer, are not so 
F formidable ; and what I hear of your morals inclines me to pay re- 
gard not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You 
I may print this. if you will. 

"•Sam. Johnson." 

And so laying in a tremendous cudgel, the old gentleman (he 
was now sixty-six) awaited the assault, which, however, was not 
delivered. 

In 1775 Boswell again came to London, and renewed some of 
the Scotch discussions. He attended a meeting of the Literary 
Club, and found the members disposed to laugh at Johnson's ten- 
derness to the stories about second-sight. Boswell heroically 
avowed his own belief. "The evidence" he said, "is enough for 
me, though not for his great mind. What will not fill a quart bottle, 
will fill a pint bottle. I am filled with belief." " Are you ? " said 
Colman ; "then cork it up." 

It was during this and the next few years that Boswell laboured 
most successfully in gathering materials for his book. In 1777 he 
only met Johnson in the country. In 1779, for some unexplained 
reason, he was lazy in making notes ; in 1780 and 1781 he was ab- 
, sent from London ; and in the following year, Johnson was visibly 
declining. The tenour of Johnson's life was interrupted during 
this period by no remarkable incidents, and his literary activity was 
not great, although the composition of the Lives of t lie Poets falls' 
between 1777 and 1780. His mind, however, as represented by his 
talk, was in full vigour. I will take in order of time a few of the 
passages recorded by Boswell, which may serve for various reasons 
to afford the best illustration of his character. Yet it may be 
worth while once more to repeat the warning tliat such fragments 
moved from their context must lose most of their charm. 

On March 26th (1775), Boswell met Johnson at the house of 
the publisher, Strahan. Strahan reminded Johnson of a character- 
istic remark which he had formerly made, that there are "few ways 
in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting 
money." On another occasion Johnson observed with equal truth, 
if less originality, that cultivating kindness was an important part 
of life, as well as money-making. Johnson then asked to see a 
country lad whom he had recommended to Straham as an appren- 
tice. He asked for five guineas on account, that he might give 
one to the boy. " Nay, if a man recommends a bov.and does noth- 
ing for him, it is sad work." A "little, thick short-legged boy " 
was accordingly brought into the courtyard, whitlier Johnson and 
Boswell descended, and the lexicographer bending himself down 
administered some good advice to the awe-struck lad with " slow 
and sonorous solemnity," ending by the presentation of the guinea 

In the evening the pair formed part of a corps of party " wits." 
led by Sir Joshua Reynolds, to the benefit of Mrs. Abington, who 



J 6 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

liad been a frequent model of the painter. Johnson praisecf Gar- 
rick's prologues, and Boswcll kindly reported the eulogy to Garrick, 
with whom he supped* at iSeauclerk's. Garrick treated him to a 
mimicry of Johnson', repeating " with pauses and half-whistling," 
the lines, — 

Os homini sublime dcdit — coelumque tueri 
Jussit — et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus : 

1 )oking aownwards, and at the end touching the ground with a con- 
torted gesticulation. Garrick was generally jealous of Johnson's 
light opinion of him, and used to take off his old master, saying, 
" Davy has some convivial pleasantry about him, but 'tis a futile 
fellow." 

Next day, at Thrales', Johnson fell foul of Gray, one of his pet 
aversions. Boswell denied that Gray was dull in poetry. '' Sir," 
replied Johnson, " he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull 
everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made people 
think him great. He was a mechanical poet." He proceeded to 
say that there were only two good stanzas in the Elegy. Johnson's 
criticism was perverse ; but if we were to collect a few of the judg- 
ments passed by contemporaries upon each other, it would be 
scarcely exceptional in its want of appreciation. It is rather odd 
to remark that Gray was generally condemned for obscurity — a 
charge which seems strangely out of place when he is ineasured by 
more recent standards. 

A day or two afterwards some one rallied Johnson on his ap- 
pearance at Mrs. Abington's benefit. "Why did you go.? " he 
asked. "Did you see.'"' " No, sir." "Did you hear?" "No, 
sir." "Why, then, sn*, did you go .'' " " Because, sir, she is a 
favourfte of the public ; and when the public cares the thousandth , 
part for you that it does for her, I will go to your benefit too." 

The^day after, Boswell won a bet from Lady Di Beauclerk by 
venturing to ask Johnson what he did with the orange-peel which 
he used to pocket. Johnson received the question amicably, l)ut 
did not clear the mystery. " Then," said Boswell, " the world 
must be left in the dark. It must be said, he scraped them, and he 
let them dry, but what he did with them next he never could be 
prevailed upon to tell." " Nay, sir," replied Johnson, "you should 
say it more emphatically — he could not be prevailed upon, even by 
his dearest friends to tell." 

This year Johnson received the degree of LL,D. from Oxford. 
He had previously (in 1765) received the sam"e honour from Dublin. 
It is remarkable, however, that familiar as the title has become, 
jO'/.TSon called himself plain Mr. to the end of his days, and was 
generally so called by his intimates. On April 2nd, at a dinner at 
Hoole's, Johnson made another assault upon Gray and Mason. 
Wliin Boswell said that there were good passages in Mason's El- 
fr'da. he conceded that there were "now and then some good imita- 
tions of Milton's bad mannLi." After some more talk, Boswell 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 77 

spoke of the cheerfulness of Fleet Street. " Why, sir," said John- 
son, " Fleet Street lias a very animated appearance, but I think that 
the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross," He added a 
story of an eminent tallow-chandler who had made a fortune in 
London, and was foolish enough to retire to the country. He grew 
so tired of his retreat, that he begged to know the melting-days 
of his successor, that he might be present at the operation. - 

On April 7th, they dined at a tavern, where the talk turned 
upon Ossia/i. Some one mentioned as an objection to its authen- 
ticity that no mention of wolves occurred in it. Johnson fell into 
a reverie upon wild beasts, and, whilst Reynolds and Langton 
were discussing something, he broke out. " Pennant tells of bears." 
What Pennant told is unknown. The company continued to talk 
whilst Johnson continued his monologue, the word "bear "occur- 
ring at intervals, like a word in a catch. At last, when a pause 
came, he was going on : " We are told that the black bear is inno- 
cent, but I should not like to trust myself with him." Gibbon 
muttered in a low tone, " I should not like to trust myself with 
yo7i " — a prudent resolution, says honest Boswell who hated Gibbon, 
if it referred to a competition of abilities. 

The talk went on to patriotism, and Johnson laid down an 
apophthegm, at " which many will start," many people, in fact, 
having little sense of humour. Such persons may be reminded 
for their comfort that at this period patriot had a technical mean- 
ing. " Patriotism is the past refuge of a scoundrel." On the lotli 
of April he laid down another dogma, calculated to offend the 
weaker brethren. He defended Pope's line — 

Man never is but always (o be blest. 

And being asked if man did not sometimes enjoy a momentary hap- 
piness, replied, "Never, but when he is drunk." It would be, 
useless to defend these and other such utterances to any one who 
cannot enjoy them without defence. 

On April nth, the pair went in Reynolds's coach to dine with 
Cambridge, at Twickenham. Johnson was in high spirits. He 
remarked as they drove down, upon the rarity of good humour in 
life. One friend mentioned by Boswell was, he said, acid, and 
another muddy. At last, stretching himself and turning with 
complacency, he observed, " 1 look upon myself as a good-humoured 
fellow " — a bit of self-esteem against which Boswell protested. 
Johnson, he admitted, was good-natured ; but was too irascible 
and impatient to be good-humoured. On reaching Cambridge's 
house, Johnson ran to \oo\ at the books. " Mr. Johnson," said 
Cambridge politely, " I am going with your pardon to accuse 
myself, for I have the same custom which I perceive you have. 
But it seems odd that one should have such a desire to look at the 
backs of books." "Sir," replied Johnson, wheeling about at the 
words, " the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. 
We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find infor 



y8 SAMUEL JOHNSON 

mation upon it. When we inquire into any subject, the first thing 
we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This 
leads us to look at catalogues, and the backs of books in libraries." 

A pleasant talk followed. Johnson denied the value attributed 
to historical reading, on the ground that we know very little except 
a few facts and dates. All the colouring, he said, was conjectural. 
Boswell chuckles over the reflection that Gibbon, who was present, 
did not take up the cudgels for his favourite study, though the 
first-fruits of his labours were to appear in the following year 
'• Probably he did not like to trust himself with Johnson." 

The conversation presently turned upon the Beggar's Opera, 
and Johnson sensibly refused to believe' that any man had been 
made a rogue by seeing it. Yet the moralist felt bound to utter 
some condemnation of such a performance, and at last, amidst the 
smothered amusement of the company, collected himself to give a 
heavy stroke : "there is in it," he said, " such a labefaciation of all 
principles as may be dangerous to morality." 

A discussion followed as to whether Sheridan was right for 
refusing to allow his wife to continue as a public singer. Johnson 
defended him " with all the high spirit of a Roman senator." 
" He resolved wisely and nobly, to be sure. He is a brave man. 
Would not a gentleman be disgraced by having his wife sing pub- 
licly for hire .•' No, sir, there can be no doubt here. I knov,' not if 
I should not prepare myself for a public singer as readily as let my 
wife be one." 

The stout old supporter of social authority went on to denounce 
the politics of the day. He asserted that politics had come to 
mean nothing but the art of rising in the world. He contrasted 
the absence of any principles with the state of the national mind 
during the stormy days of the seventeenth centurv. This gives the 
pith of Johnston's political prejudices. He hated Whigs blindly 
from his cradle ; but he justified his hatred on the ground that they 
were now all "bottomless Whigs," that is to say, that pierce where 
you would, you came ujwn no definite creed, but only upon hollow 
formulae, intended as a cloak for private interest. If Burke and', 
one or two of his friends be excepted, the remark had but too 
much justice. 

In 1776, Boswell found Johnson rejoicing in the prospect of a 
journey to Italy with the Thrales. Before starting he was to take 
a trip to the country, in which Boswell agreed to join. Boswell 
gathered up various bits of advice before their departure. One 
seems to have commended itself to him as specially available for 
practice. "A man who had been drinking frcelv," said the moralist, 
" should never go into a new companx^ He would probably strike 
them as ridiculous, though he might f)e in unison with those who 
had been drinking with him." Johnson propounded another favour 
ite theory. " A ship," he said, "was worse than a gaol. There is in 
a gaol better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind ; 
and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger." 

On March 1 9th, they went by coach to the Angel at Oxford ; 



SAMUEL Ji ' IIASON. 79 

and next morning visited the Master of I'niversity College, who 
chose with Boswell to act in opposition to a very sound bit of 
advice given by Johnson soon afterwards — perhaps with some 
reference to the proceeding. " Never speak of a man in his own 
presence ; it is always indelicate and may be offensive." The two 
however, discussed Johnson without reserve. The Master said 
that he would have given Johnson a hundred pounds for a discourse 
on the British Constitution ; and Boswell suggested that Johnson 
should write two volumes of no great bulk ;ipon Church and State, 
which should comprise the whole substance of the argument. " He 
should erect a fort on the confines of each." Johnson was not 
unnaturalty displeased with the dialogue, and growled out, •' Why 
should I be always writing ? " 

Presently, they went to see Dr. Adams, the doctor's old friend, 
who had been answering Hume. Boswell, who had done his best 
to court the acquaintance of Voltaire, Rousseau, Wilkes, and Hume 
himself, felt it desirable to reprove Adams for having met Hume 
with civility. He aired his admirable sentiments iYi a long speech, 
observing upon the connexion between theory and practice, and 
remarking, by way of practical application, that, if aninlidel were at 
once vain and ugly, he might be compared to " Cicero's beautiful 
image of Virtue " — which would, as he seems to think, be a crushing 
retort. Boswell always delighted in fighting with his gigantic 
backer close behind him. Johnson, as he had doubtless expected, 
chimed in with the argument. "You should do your best," said 
Johnson, " to diminish the authority, as well as dispute the argu- 
ments of 3'Our adversary, because most people are biased more by 
personal respect than by reasoning." "You would not jostle a 
chimney-sweeper," said Adams. "Yes," replied Johnson, "if it 
were necessary to jostle him down." 

The pair proceeded by post-chaise past Blenheim, and dined at 
a good inn at Chapelhonse. Johnson boasted of the superiority, 
long since vanished if it ever existed, of English to French inns, 
and quoted with great emotion Shenstone's lines— 

Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, 

Where'er his stages may have been, 
Must sigh to think he still has fjDund 

The warmest welcome at an inn. 

As they drove along rapidly in the post-chaise, he exclaimed, 
" Life has not many'better things than this." On another occa- 
sion he said that he' should like fo spend his life driving briskly in 
a post-chaise with a pretty woman, clever enough to add to the 
conversation. The pleasure was partly owing to the fact that his 
deafness was less troublesome in a carriage. But he admitted 
that there were drawbacks even to this pleasure. Boswell asked 
him whether he would not add a post-chaise, journey to the other 
sole cause of happiness — namely, drunkenness. '■ No, sir," said 
Johnson, " you are driving rapidlv from something or to some- 
thing;." 



8o SAMUEL JOF/A'SOjV. 

They vveRt to Birmingham, where Boswell pumped Hector 
about Johnson's early clays, and saw the works of Boulton, Watt's 
partner,' who said to him, "I sell here, sir, what all the world de- 
desires to have— /i?w^r." Thence they went to Lichfield, and 
met more of the rapidly thinning circle of Johnson's oldest friends. 
Here Boswell was a little scandalised by Johnson's warm exclama- 
tion on opening a letter — " One of the most dreadful things that 
lias happened in my time ! " This turned out to be the death of 
Thrale's only son. Boswell thought the phrase too big for the 
event, and was some time before he could feel a proper concern. 
He was, however, " curious to observe how Dr. Johnson would be 
affected," and was again a little scandalised by the reply to his 
consolatory remark that the Thrales still had claughtcrs. "Sir," 
said Johnson, "don't you know how you yourself think? Sir. he 
wishes to propagate his name." The great man was actually put- 
ting the family sentiment of a brewer in the same category with 
the sentiments of the heir of Auchinleck. Johnson, however, 
calmed down, but resolved to hurry back to London. 'liiey stayed 
a night at Taylor's, who remarked that he had fought a good many 
battles for a physician, one of their common friends. ''But you 
should consider, sir," said Johnson, " that by every one of your 
victories he is a loser ; for every man of whom you get the better 
will be very angry, and resolve not to employ him, whereas if peo 
pie get the better of you in argument about him, the}' will think 

' We'll send for Dr. nevertheless ! ' " 

It was after their return to London that Boswell won the great- 
est triumph of his friendship. He carried through a negotiation, 
to which, as Burke pleasantly said, there was nothing equal in the 
whole liistory of the corps diplomatique. At some moment of en- 
thusiasm it had occurred to him to bring Johnson ir.lo company 
with Wilkes. The infidel demagogue was probably in the mind of 
the Tory High Churchman, when lie threw out that pleasant little 
apophthegm about patriotism. Tt) bring together two such op- 
posites withort provoking a collision would be the crowning 
triumph of Boswell's curiosity. He was ready to rmi all hazards as 
a chemist might try some new experiment at the risk of a destruc- 
tive explosion ; but being resolved, he took eveiy precaution with 
admirable foresight. 

Boswell had been invited by the Dillys, well-known booksellers 
of the day, to meet Wilkes. " Let us have Johnson," suggested 
the gallant Boswell. "Not for the world !" exclaimed Dilly. But, 
on Boswell's undertaking the negotiation, he consented to the ex- 
periment. Boswell went off to Johnson and politely invited him 
in Dilly's name. " I will wait upon him," said Johnson. " Pro- 
vided, sir, I suppose," said the diplomatic Boswell, "that the com- 
pany which he is to have is agreeable to you.'" " W'hat do you 
mean, sir.''" exclaimed Johnson. "What do you take me for.' 
Do you think I am so ignorant of the world as to prescribe to a 
gentleman what company he is to have at his table ? " BoswcU 
ViOrked the point a little farther, till, by judicious manipulation, he 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 8 1 

had got Johnson to commit himself to meeting anybody — even 
Jaclv Wilkes, to make a wild hypothesis — at the Dillys' table. 
Boswell retired, hoping to think that he had fixed the discussion 
in Johnson's mind. 

Tlie great day arrived, and Boswell, hke a consummate general 
who leaves nothing to chance, went himself to fetch Johnson to 
tlie dinner. The great man had forgotten the engagement, and 
was " buffeting his books "in a dirty shirt and amidst clouds of 
dust. When reminded of his promise, he said that he had ordered 
dinner at home with Mrs. Williams. Entreaties of the warmest 
kind from Boswell softened the peevish old lady, to whose pleasure 
Johnson had referred him. Boswell flew back, announced Mrs. 
Williams's consent, and Johnson roared, "Frank, a clean shirt ! " 
and wa!^ soon- in a hackney-coach. Boswell rejoiced like a "for- 
tune-hunter who has got an heiress into a post-chaise with him to 
set out for Gretna Green." Yet the joy was with trembling. Ar- 
rived at Dillys', Johnson found himself amongst strangers, and 
Boswell watched anxiously from a corner. " Who is that gentle- 
man .? " whispered Johnson to Dilly. "Mr. Arthur Lee." John- 
son whistled " too-too-too " doubtfully, for Lee was a patriot and 
an American. " And who is the gentleman in lace ? " " Mr. 
Wilkes, sir." Johnson subsided into a window-seat and fixed his 
eye on a book. He was fairly in the toils. His reproof of Bos- 
well was recent enough to prevent him from exhibiting his dis- 
pleasure, and he resolved to restrain himself. 

At dinner Wilkes, placed next to Johnson, took up his part in 
the performance. He pacified the sturdy moralist by delicate at- 
tentions to his needs. He helped him carefully to some fine veal. 
" Pray give me leave, sir ; it is better here — a little of the brown — 
some fat, sir — a little of the stuffing — some gravy — let me have the 
pleasure of giving you some butter. Allow me to recommend a 
squeeze of this orange ; or the lemon, perhaps, may have more 
zest." " Sir, sir," cried Johnson, " I am obliged to you, sir." 
bowing and turning to him, with a look for some time of " surly 
.'•irtue," and soon of complacency. 

Gradually the conversation became cordial. Johnson told of 
the fascination exercised by Foote, who, like Wilkes, had succeeded 
in pleasing him against his will. Foote once took to selling beer, 
and it was so bad that the servants of Fitzherbert, one of his cus- 
tomers, resolved to protest. They chose a little black boy to carry 
their remonstrance ; but the boy waited at table one day when 
Foote was present, and returning to his companions, said, " This 
is the finest man I have ever seen. I will not deliver your mes- 
sage ; I will drink his beer." From Foote the transition was easy 
to Garrick, whom JoHnson, as usual, defended against the attacks 
of others. He maintained that Garrick's reputation for avarice, 
though unfounded, liad been rather useful than otherwise. " You 
despise a man for avarice, but you do not hate him." The clamour 
would have been more effectual, liad it been directed against his 
living with splendour too great for a player. Johnson went on to 

d 



82 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

speak Oi the difficulty of getting biographical information. When 
lie liad wished to write a life of Dryden, he applied to two living 
men who remembered him. One could only tell him that Dryden 
liad a chair by the fire at Will's Coffee-house in winter, which was 
moved to the balcony in summer. The otlier (Gibber) could only 
report that he remembered Dryden as a " decent old man, arbiter 
of critical disputes at Will's." 

Johnson and Wilkes luid one point in common — a vigorous prej- 
udicc against the Scotch, and upon this topic they cracked their 
jokes in friendly emulation. When tliey met upon a later occasion 
(lySljthey still pursued this inexhaustible subject. Wilkes told 
how a privateer had completely plundered seven Scotch islands, 
and re-embarked with three and sixpence. Johnson now remarked 
in answer to somebody who said " Poor old England is lost ! " 
" Sir, it is not so much to be lamented that old England is lost, as 
that the Scotch have found it." " You must know, sir," he said to 
Wilkes, "that I lately took my friend Boswell and showed him 
genuine civilized life in an English provincial town. I turned him 
toose at Lichfield, that he might see for once' real civility, for you 
know he lives among savages in Scotland and among rakes in Lon- 
don." " Except," said Wilkes, '' when he is with grave, sober, 
decent people like you and me." "And we ashamed of him," 
added Johnson, smiling. 

Boswell had to bear some jokes against himself and his country- 
men from the pair ; but he had triumphed, and rejoiced greatly 
when he went home with Johnson, and heard the great man speak 
of his pleasant dinner to Mrs. Williams. Johnson seems to have 
been permanently reconciled to his foe. " Did we not hear so 
much said of Jack Wilkes," he remarked next year, " we should 
think more highly of his conversation. Jack has a great variety of 
talk, Jack is a scholar, and Jack has the manners of a gentleman. 
But, after hearing his name sounded from pole to pole as the 
phoenix of convivial felicity, we are disappointed in his -company. 
He has always been at me, but I would do Jack a kindness rather 
than not. The contest is now over." 

In fact, Wilkes had ceased to play any p-rt in public life. 
When Johnson met him next (in 1781) they joked about such dan- 
gerous topics as some of Wilkes's political performances. John- 
son sent him a copy of the Lives, and they were seen conversing 
tcte-a-tcie in confidential whispers about George II. and the King 
of Prussia. To Boswell's mind it suggested the happy days when 
the lion should lie down with the kid, or, as Dr. Barnard suggested, 
the goat. 

In the year 1777 Johnson began the Lives of the Poets, in com- 
pliance with a request from the booksellers," who wished for pre- 
faces to a large collection of English poetry. Johnson asked for 
this work the extremely modest sum of 200 guineas, when he might 
easilv, according to Malone, have received 1000 or 1500. He did 
not meet BoBwell till September, when they spent ten^ days to- 
gether at Dr. Taylor's. The subject which specially interested 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 83 

r.oswell at this time was the fate of the unlucky Dr. Dodd, hano;ed 
for forgery in the previous June. Dodd seems to have been a 
worthless charlatan of the popular preacher variety. His crime 
would not in 'our days have been thought worthy of so severe a 
punishment ; but his contemporaries were less shocked by the 
fact of death being inflicted for such a fault, than by the fact of its 
being inflicted on a clergyman. Johnson exerted himself to pro- 
cure a remission of the sentence by writing various letters and 
petitions on Dodd's behalf. He seems to have been deeply moved 
by the man's appeal, and could "not bear the thought " that any 
negligence of his should lead to the death of a fellow-creature ; but 
he said that if he had himself been in authority he would have 
signed the death-warrant, and for the man himself, he had as little 
respect as might be. He said, indeed, that Dodd was right in not 
joining in the " cant " about leaving a wretched world. " No, no," 
said the poor rogue, "ithas been a very agreeable world to me." 
Dodd had allowed to pass for his own one of the papers composed 
for him by Johnson, and the Doctor was not quite pleased. When, 
however, Seward expressed a doubt as to Dodd's power of writing 
so forcibly, Johnson felt bound not to expose him. " Why should 
you think so .■* Depend upon it, sir, when any man knows he is to 
be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." 
On another occasion, Johnson expressed a doubt himself as to 
whether Dodd had really composed a certain prayer on the night 
before his execution. " Sir, do you think that a man the night 
before he is to be hanged cares for the succession of the royal 
family ? Though he ?!iay have composed this prayer then. A man 
who has been canting all his life may cant to the last; and yet a 
man who has been refused a pardon after so much petitioning, 
would hardly be praying thus fervently for the king." 

The last day at Taylor's was characteristic. Johnson was very 
cordial to his disciple, and Boswell fancied that he could defend 
his master at " the point of his sword." " My regard for you," said 
Johnson. " is greater almost than I have words to express, but I 
do not choose to be always repeating it. Write it down in the 
first leaf of your ])ocket-book, and never doubt of it again." They 
became sentimental, and talked of the misery of human life. 
Boswell spoke of the pleasures of society. " Alas, sir," replied 
Johnson, like a true pessimist, "these are only struggles for happi- 
ness ! " He felt exhilarated, he said, when he first went to Rane- 
lagh, but he changed to the mood of Xerxes weeping at the sight 
of his army. " It went to my heart to consider that there was not 
one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and 
think; but that the thoughts of each individual would be distress- 
ing when alone." Some years before he had gone with Boswell to 
the Pantheon and taken a more cheerful view. When Boswell 
doubted whether there were many happy people present, he said, 
"Yes, sir, there are many happy people here. There are many 
people here who are watching hundreds, and who think hundreds 
are watching them." The more permanent feeling was that which 



84 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

he expressed in the " serene autumn night " in Taylor's gardea 
He was willing, however, to talk calmly about eternal punishment, 
and to admit the possibility of a "mitigated interpretation." 

After supper he dictated to Boswell an argu...ent in favour of 
the negro who was then claiming his liberty in Scotland. He 
hated slavery with a zeal which the excellent Boswell thought to be 
" without knowledge ; " and on one occasion gave as a toast to some 
"very grave men " at Oxford. " Here's to the next insurrection of 
negroes in the West Indies." The hatred was combined with as 
hearty a dislike for American independence. " How is it," he said, 
" that we always hear the loudest yelps for liberty amongst the 
drivers of negroes ? " The harmony of the evening was unluckily 
spoilt by an explosion of this prejudice. Boswell undertook the 
defence of the colonists, and the discussion became so tierce that 
though Johnson had expressed a willingness to sit up all night with 
him, they were glad to part after an hour or two, and go to bed. 

In 1778, Boswell came to London and found Johnson absorbed, 
to an extent which apparently excited his jealousy, by his intimacy 
with the Thrales. They had, however, several agreeable meetings. 
One was at the club, and Boswell's report of the conversation is 
the fullest that we have of any of its meetings. A certain reserve 
is indicated by his using initials for the interlocutors, of whom, 
however, one can be easily identified as Burke. The talk began 
by a discussion of an antique statue, said to be the dog of Alcil)ia- 
des, and valued at 1000/. Burke said that the representation of no 
animal could be worth so much. Johnson, whose taste for art was 
a vanishing quantity, said that the value was proportional to the 
difficulty. A statue, as he argued on another occasion, would be 
worth nothing if it were cut out of a carrot. Everything, he now 
said, was valuable which "enlarged the sphere of human powers." 
The first man who balanced a straw upon his nose, or rode upon 
three horses at once, deserved the applause of mankind ; and so 
statues of animals should be preserved as a proof of dexterity, 
though man should not continue such fruitless labours. 

The conversation became more instructive under the guidance 
of Burke. He maintained what seemed to his hearers a paradox, 
though it would be interesting to hear his arguments from some 
profounder economist than Boswell, that a country would be made 
more populous by emigration. "There are bulls enough in Ire- 
land," he remarked incidentally in the course of the argument. 
" So, sir, I should think from your argument," said Johnson, for 
once condescending to an irresistible pun. It is recorded, too, 
that he once made a bull himself, observing that a horse was so 
slow that when it went up hill, it stood still. If he now failed to 
apprecate Burke's argument, he made one good remark. Another 
speaker said that unhealthy countries were the most populous. 
" Countries which are the most populous,"' replied Johnson, "have 
the most destructive diseases. That is the true state of the pro- 
position ; " and indeed, the remark a2:)plies to the case of emigra- 
tion. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 85 

A discussion then took pkice as to whether it would be ^\olth 
while for Burke to take so much trouble with speeches which neve" 
decided a vote. Burke replied that a speech, though it did not 
gain one vote, would have an influence, and maintained that the 
House of Commons was not wholly corrupt. " We are all more or 
less governed by interest," was Johnson's comment. '' But inter- 
est will not do everything. In a case which admits of doubt, we 
try to think on the side which is for our interest, and generally 
bring ourselves to act accordingly. But the subject must admit of 
diversity of colouring ; it must receive a colour on that side. In 
the House of Commons there are members enough who will not 
vote whatis grossly absurd and unjust. No, sir, there must always 
be right enough, or appearance of right, to keep wrong in counte- 
nance." After some deviations, the conversation returned to this 
point. Johnson and Burke agreed on a characteristic statement. 
Burke said that from his experience he had learnt to think better 
of mankind. "From my experience," replied Johnson, "I have 
found them worse on commercial dealings, more disposed to cheat 
then I had any notion of ; but more disposed to do one another 
good than I had conceived." " Less just, and more beneficent," 
as another speaker suggested. Johnson proceeded to say that 
considering the pressure of want, it was wonderful that men would 
do so much for each other. The greatest liar is said to speak more 
truth than falsehood, and perhaps the worst man might do more 
good than not. But when Boswell suggested that perhaps expe- 
rience might increase our estimate of human happiness, Johnson re- 
turned to his habitual pessimism. " No, sir, the more we inquire, 
the more we shall find men less happy.'' The talk soon wandered 
off into a disquistiion upon the folly of deliberately testing the 
strength of our friend's affection. 

The evening ended by Johnson accepting a commission to 
write to a friend who had given to the Club a hogshead of claret, 
and to request another, with " a happy ambiguity of expression," 
in the hopes that it might also be a present. 

Some days afterwards, another conversation took place, which 
has a certain celebrity in Boswellian literature. The scene was at 
Dilly's, and the guests included Miss Seward and Mrs. Knowles, 
a well-known Quaker Lady. Before dinner Johnson seized upon a 
book which he kept in his lap during dinner, wrapped up in the 
table-cloth. His attention was not distracted from the various 
business of the hour, but he hit upon a topic which happily com- 
bined the two approprate veins of thought. He boasted that he 
would write a cookery-book upon philosophical principles ; and 
declared in opposition to Miss Seward that such a task was beyond ^ 
the sphere of woman. Perhaps this led to a discussion upon the " 
privileges of men, in which Johnson put down Mrs. Knowles, who 
had some hankering for women's rights, by the Shakspearian 
maxim that if two men ride on a horse, one must ride behind. 
Driven from her position in this world, poor Mrs. Knowles hoped 
that sexes might be equal in the next. Boswell reproved her by 



86 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

the remark already quoted, that men might as well expect to be equal 
to angels. He enforces this view by an illustration suggested by the 
" Rev. Mr. Brown of Utrecht," who had observed that a great or 
small glass might be equally full, though not holding equal quanti- 
ties. Mr. Brown intended this for a confutation of Hume, who has 
said that a little Miss, dressed for a ball, may be as happy as an 
orator who has won some triumphant success.* 

The conversation thus took a theological turn, and Mrs. Knowles 
was fortunate enough to win Johnson's high approval. He de- 
fended a doctrine maintained by Soame Jenyns, that friendship is 
not a Christian virtue. Mrs. Knowles remarked that Jesus had 
twelve disciples, but there was one whom he loved. Johnson, 
" with eyes sparkling benignantly," exclaimed, " Very well indeed, 
madam; you have said very well ! " 

So far all had gone smoothly ; but here, for some inexplicable 
reason, Johnson burst into a sudden fury against the American 
rebels, whom he described as "rascals, robbers, pirates," and 
roared out a tremendous volley, which might almost have been 
audible across the Atlantic. Boswell sat and trembled, but gradually 
diverted the sage to less exciting topics. The name of Jonathan 
Edwards suggested a discussion upon free will and necessity, upon 
which poor Boswell was much given to worry himself. Some time 
afterwards Johnson wrote to him, in answer to one of his lamenta- 
tions : " I hoped you had got rid of all this hypocrisy of misery. 
What have you to do with liberty and necessity ? Or what more 
than to hold your tongue about it .'' " Boswell could never take this 
sensible advice; but he got little comfort from his oracle. "We 
know that we are all free, and there's an end on't," was his state- 
ment on one occasion, and now he could only say, " All theory is 
against the freedom of the will, and all experience for it." 

Some familiar topics followed, which play a great part in Bos- 
well's reports. ' Among the favourite topics of the sentimentalists 
of the day was the denunciation of " luxury," and of civilised life in 
general. There was a disposition to find in the South Sea savages or 
American Indians an embodiment of the fancied state of nature. 
Johnson heartily despised the affectation. He was told of an 
American woman who had to be bound in order to keep her from 
savage life. " She must have been an animal, a beast," said Bos- 
well. " Sir," said Johnson, " she was a speaking cat." Somebody 
quoted to him with admiration the soliloquy of an officer who had 
lived in the wilds of America : " Here am I, free and unrestrained, 
amidst the rude magnificence of nature, with the Indian woman by 
my side, and this gun, with which I can procure food when I want 
, it ! What more can be desired for human happiness ? " " Do not 
allow yourself, sir," replied Johnson, " to be imposed upon by such 
gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could 
speak, he might as well exclaim, ' Here am I with this cow and this 

* Boswell reniarlcs as a curious coincidence tliat tlie illustration had been used by a Dr. 
King, a dissenting minister. Doubtless is has been used oiten eiiougii. For oiieinstnnce 
see Donne's Servians (Alford's Edition), vol. i., p- 5. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 87 

grass; what beijig can enjoy greater felicity?'" When Johnson 
implored Boswell to " clear his mind of cant," he was attacking his 
disciple for affecting a serious depression about public affairs ; but 
tlie cant vvliich he hated would certainly have included as its first 
article an admiration for the state of nature. 

On the present occasion Johnson defended luxury, and said 
that he had learnt much from Mandeville — a shrewd cynic, in whom 
Johnson's hatred for humbug is exaggerated into a general disbelief 
in real as well as sham nobleness of sentiment. As the conversa- 
tion proceeded, Johnson expressed his habitual horror of death, 
and caused Miss Seward's ridicule by talking seriously of ghosts 
and the importance of the question of their reality ; and then 
followed an explosion, which seems to have closed this characteris- 
tic evening. A young woman had become a Quaker under the in- 
fluence of Mrs. Knowles, who now proceeded to deprecate John- 
son's wrath at what he regarded as an apostasy. " Madam," he 
said, " she is an odious wench," and he proceeded to denounce her 
audacity in presuming to choose a religion for herself. " She knew 
no more of the points of difference," he said, " than of the differ- 
ence between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems." When 
Mrs. Knowles said that she had the New Testament before her, 
he ,said that it was the " most difficult book in the world," and he 
proceeded to attack the unlucky proselyte with a fury which shocked 
the two ladies. Mrs. Knowles afterwards published a report of 
this conversation, and obtained another report, with which, how- 
ever, she was not satisfied, from Miss Seward. Both of them 
represent the poor doctor as hopelessly confuted by the mild dig- 
nity and calm reason of Mrs. Knowles, though the triumph is 
painted in far the brightest colours by Mrs. Knowles herself 
Unluckily, there is not a trace of Johnson's manner, except in one 
phrase, in either report, and they are chiefl)' curious as an indirect 
testimony of Boswell's superior powers. The passage, in whicli 
both the ladies agree, is that Johnson, on the expression of Mrs. 
Knowles's hope that he would meet the young lady in another 
world, retorted that he was not fond of meeting fools anywhere. 

Poor Boswell was at this time a water-drinker by Johnson's 
recommendation, though unluckily for himself he never broke off 
his drinking habits for long. They had a conversation at Paoli's, 
in which Boswell argued against his present practice. Johnson 
remarked " that wine gave a man nothing, but only put in motion 
what had been locked up in frost." It was a key, suggested some 
one, which opened a box, but the box might be full or empty. 
" Nay, sir," said Johnson. " conversation is the key, wine is a pick- 
Jock, which forces open the box and injures it. A man should 
cultivate his mind, so as to have that confidence and readiness with- 
out wine which wine gives." Boswell characteristically said that 
the great difficulty was from "benevolence." It was hard to re- 
fuse "a good, worthy man " who asked you to try his cellar. 
This, according to Johnson, was mere conceit, implying an 
exaggerated estimate of your importance to your entertainer. 



83 SAMUEL JO/flVSOAr. 

Reynolds gallantly took up the oi)po.site side, and produced the one 
recorded instance of a Johnsonian blush. " I won't argue any 
more with you, sir," said Johnson, wiio thought every man to be 
elevated who drank wine, "you are too far gone." "I should 
have thought so indeed, sir, had I made such a speech as you have 
now done," said lieynolds ; and Johnson apologised with the 
aforesaid blush. 

The explosion was soon over on this occasion. Not long after- 
wards, Johnson attacked Boswell so fiercely at a dinner at Rey- 
nolds's, that the poor disciple kept away for a week. They made it 
up when they met next, and Johnson solaced Boswell's wounded 
vanity by highly commending an image made by him to express his 
feelings. " I don't care how often or how high Johnson tosses me, 
when only friends are present, for then I fall upon soft ground ; but 
I do not like falling on stones, which is the case when enemies are 
present." The phrase may recall one of Johnson's happiest illustra- 
tions. When some one said in his presence that a conge d'eltre 
might be considered as only a strong recommendation ; " Sir," 
replied Johnson, "it is such a recommendation as if I should throw 
you out of a two-pair of stairs window, and recommend you to fall 
soft." 

It i.s perhaps time to cease these extracts from laoswell's reports. 
The next two years were less fruitful. In 1779 Roswell was care- 
less, though twice in London, and in 1780, he did not pay his annual 
visit. Boswell has partly filled up the gap by a collection of say- 
ings made by Langton, some passages from which have been quoted, 
and his correspondence gives various details. Garrick died in 
January of 1779, and Beauclerk in March, 17S0. Johnson himself 
seems to have shown few symptoms of increasing age ; l)ut a 
change was approaching, and the last years of his life were destined 
to be clouded, not merely by jjhysical weakness, but by a change of 
circumstances which had great infiuence upon his happiness. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. gg 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CLOSING YEARS OF JOHNSON'S LIFE. 

In following Boswell's guidance we have necessarily seen only 
one side of Johnson's life ; and probably that side which had least 
significance for the man himself. 

Boswell saw in him chiefly the great dictator of conversation ; 
and though the reports of Johnson's talk represent his character in 
spite of some qualifications with unusual fulness, there were many 
traits very inadequately revealed at the Mitre or the Club, at Mrs. 
Thrale's, or in meetings wirh Wilkes or Reynolds. We may catcli 
some glimpses from his letters and diaries of tliat inward life whicli 
consisted generally in a long succession of struggles against an 
oppressive and often paralysing melancholy. Another most note- 
worthy side to his character is revealed in his relations to persons 
too humble for admission to the tables at which he exerted a des- 
potic sway. Upon this side Johnson was almost entirely loveable. 
We often have to regret the imperfection of the records of 

The best portion of a good man's life, 
His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
Of kindness and of love. 

Everywhere in Johnson'* letters and in the occasional anecdotes, 
we come upon indications of a tenderness and untiring benevolence 
which would make us forgive far worse faults than have ever been 
laid to his charge. Nay, the very asperity of the man's outside be- 
comes endeared to us by the association. His irritability never 
vented itself against the helpless, and his rough impatience of 
fanciful trouble implied no want of sympathy for real sorrow. One 
of Mrs. Thrale's anecdotes is intended to show Johnson's harsh- 
ness : — " When I one day lamented the loss of a first cousin killed 
in America, ' Pr'ythee, my dear,' said he, ' have done with canting ; 
how would the world be the worse for it, I may ask, if all your re- 
lations were at once spitted like larks and roasted for Presto's 
supper.-" Presto was the dog that lay under the table while he 
talked." The counter version, given by Boswell is, that Mrs. 
Thrale- related her cousin's death in the midst of a hearty supper, 
and that Johnson, shocked at her want of feeling, said, " Madam, 
it would give voii very little concern if all vour relations were 
spiited like those larks, and roasted lor Presto's supper." Taking 



Cfo SAMUEL JOHNSON: 

the most unfavourable version, we may judge how mucli real in- 
difference to human sorrow was implied by seeing liow Johnson 
was affected by a loss of one of his liumblest friends. It is but 
one case of many. In 1767, he took leave, as he notes in his diary, 
of his " dear okl friend, Catherine Chambers," who had been for 
about forty-three years in the service of his family. " I desired all 
to withdraw," he says, " then told her that we were to part for 
ever, and, as Christians, we should part with prayer, and that I 
would, if she was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She ex- 
pressed great desire to hear me, and held up her poor hands as she 
lay in bed, with great fervour, while I prayed, kneeling by her, in 
nearly the following words" — which shall not be repeated here — 
" I then kissed her," he adds. " She told me that to part was \he 
greatest pain that she had ever felt, and tliat she hoped we should 
meet again in a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes, and 
great emotion of kindness, the same hopes. We kissed and parted 
— I humbly hope to meet again and part no more." 

A man with so true and tender a heart could say serenely, what 
with some men would be a mere excuse for want of sympathy, that 
he '• hated to hear people whine about metaphysical distresses 
when there was so much want and hunger in the world.'' He had 
a sound and righteous contempt for all affectation of excessive 
sensibility. Suppose, said Boswell to him, whilst their common 
friend Baretti was lying under a charge of murder, ''that one of 
your intimate friends were apprehended for an offence for which 
he might be hanged." '• I should do what I could," replied John- 
son, " to bail him, and give him any other assistance ; but if he 
were once fairly hanged, I should not suffer." " Would you eat 
your dinner that day, sir ? " asks Boswell. " Yes, sir ; and eat it 
as if he were eating with me. Why there's Bare-tti, who's to be 
tried for his life to-morrow. Friends have risen up for him upon 
every side ; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a 
slice of plum-pudding the less. Sir, t'liat sympathetic feeling goes 
a very little way in depressing the mind.'' Boswell illustrated the 
subject by saying that Tom Davies liad just written a letter to 
Foote, telhng him that he could not ..leep from concern about 
Baretti, and at the same time recommending a young man who 
kept a picklc-shop Johnson summed up by the remark: '' "^ou 
will iind these very feeling people are not very ready to do you 
good. They pay you by feeling.'" Johnson never objected to 
feeling, but to the waste of feeling. 

In a similar vein he told Mrs. Thrale that a •• surly fellow ''' like 
himself had no compassion to spare for "wounds given to vanity 
and softness," whilst witnessing the common sight of actual want 
in great cities. On Lady Tavistock's death, said to have been 
cavised by grief for her husband's loss, he observed that her life 
might have been saved if she had been put into a small cl>andler's 
shop, with a child to nurse. When Mrs. Thrale suggested that a 
lady would be grieved because her friend had lost the chance of a 
fortune, " She will suffer as much, perhaps," he replied, "as yuui 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. ^i 

horse did when your cow miscarried." Mrs. Thrale testified that 
he once reproached her sternly for complaining of the dust. When 
he knew, he said, how many poor families would perish next winter 
for want of the bread which the drought would deny, he could not 
bear to hear ladies sighingfor rain on account of their complexions 
or their clothes. While reporting such sayings, she adds, that he 
loved the poor as she never saw any one else love them, with an 
earnest desire to make them happy. His charity was unbounded ; 
he proposed to allow himself one hundred a year out of the three 
hundred of his pension ; but the Thrales could never discover that 
he really spent upon himself more than ^70, or at most ^80. He 
had numerous dependants, abroad as well as at home, who "did 
not like to see him latterly, unless he brought 'em money." He 
filled his pockets with small cash which he distributed to beggars 
in defiance of politicial economy. When told that the recipients only 
laid it out upon gin or tobacco, he replied that it was savage to deny 
them the few coarse pleasures which the richer disdained. Numer- 
ous instances are given of more judicious charity. When, for ex- 
ample, a Benedictine monk, whom he had seen in Paris, became a 
Protestant, Johnson supported him for some months in London, 
till he could get a living. Once coming home late at night, he 
found a poor woman lying in the street. He carried her to his 
house on his back, and found that she was reduced to the lowest 
stage of want, poverty, and disease. He took care of her at his 
own charge, with all tenderness, until she was restored to health, 
and tried to have her put into a virtuous way of living. His house, 
in his later years, was filled with various waifs and strays, to whom 
he gave hospitality and sometimes support, defending himself by 
saying that if he did not help them nobody else would. The head 
of his household was Miss Williams, who had been a friend of his 
Rfife's, and after coming to stay with him, in order to undergo an 
operation for cataract, became a permanent inmate of his house. 
She had a small income of some ^40 a year, partly from the charity 
of connexions of her father's, and partly arising from a little book 
of miscellanies published by subscription. She was a woman of 
some sense and cultivation, and when she died (in 1783) Johnson 
said that for thirty years she had been to him as a sister. Boswell's 
jealousy was excited during the first period of his acquaintance, 
when Goldsmith one night went home with Johnson, crying " I go 
to Miss Williams " — a phrase which implied admission to an inti- 
macy from which Boswell was as yet excluded. Boswell soon ob- 
tained the coveted privilege, and testifies to the respect with which 
Johnson always treated the inmates of his family. Before leaving 
her to dine with Boswell at the hotel, he asked her what Httle deli- 
cacy should be sent to her from the tavern. Poor Miss Williams, 
however, was peevish, and, according to Hawkins, had been known 
to drive Johnson out of the room by her reproaches, and Boswell's 
delicacy was shocked by the supposition that she tested the fulness 
of cups of tea, by putting her finger inside. We are glad to know 
that this was a false impression, and, in fact, Miss Williams, how- 



92 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

ever unfortunate in temper and circumstances, seems to have been 
a lady by manners and education. 

The next inmate of this queer household was Robert Levett, a 
man who had been a waiter at a coffee-house in Paris frequented 
by surgeons. They had enaMod him to pick up some of their art, 
and he set up as an " obscure practiser in physic amongst the- 
lower people " in London. He took from them such fees as he 
could get, including provisions, sometimes, unfortunately for him, 
of the potable kind. He was once entrapped into a cjueer marriage, 
and Johnson had to arrange a separation from liis wife. Johnson, 
it seems, had a good opinion of his medical skill, and more or less 
employed his services in that capacity. He attended his patron 
at his breakfast ; breakfasting, said Percy, " on the crust «f a roll, 
which Johnson threw to him after tearing out the crumb." The 
phrase, it is said, goes too far ; Johnson always took pains that Levett 
should be treated rather as a friend than as a dependant. 

Besides these humble friends, tliere was a Mrs. Desmoulins, 
the daughter of a Lichfield physician. Johnson had had some quar- 
rel with the father in his youth for revealing a confession of the 
mental disease which tortured him from early years. He supported 
Mrs. Desmoulins none the less, giving iiouse-room to her and her 
daughter, and making her an allowance of half-a-guinea a week, a 
sum equal to a twelfth part of his pension. Frances Barber has 
already been mentioned, and we have a dim vision of a Miss Car- 
michael, who completed what he facetiously called his ''seraglio." 
It was anything but a happy family. He summed uptheir re- 
lations in a letter to Mrs. Thrale. "Williams," he says, "hates 
" every body ; Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Wil- 
liams ; Desmoulins hates them both ; Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves 
none of them." Frank Barber complained il Miss Williams's au- 
thority, and Miss Williams of Frank's insubordination. Intruders 
who had taken refuge under his roof, brought their children there 
in his absence, and grumbled if their dinners were ill-dressed. The 
old man bore it all, relieving himself by an occasional growl, but re- 
proaching any who ventured to join in the growl for their indiffer- 
ence to the sufferings of poverty. Levett died in January, 17S2; 
Miss Williams died after a lingering illness, in 1783, and Johnson 
grieved in solitude for the loss of his testy companions. A poem, 
composed upon Levett's death, records his feelings in language 
which wants the refinement of Goldsmith or the intensity of Cowper's 
pathos, but which is yet so sincere and tender as to be more im- 
pressive than far more elegant compositions. It will be a fitting 
close to this brief indication of one side of Johnson's character, 
too easily overlooked in Boswell's pages, to quote part of what 
Thackeray truly calls the "sacred verses " upon Levett : — 

Well tried through many a varying year 

See Levett to the grave descend, 
Officious, innocent, sincere, 

Of evcrv friendless name the friend. 



SAAfUEL JOHNSON. 93 

In misery's darkest cavern known, 

His ready help was ever nigh ; 
Where hopeless anguish pour'd his groan, 

And lonely want retired to die. 

No summons mock'd by dull delay, 

No petty gains disdain'd by pride 
The modest wants of every day, 

The toil of every day supplied. 

His virtues walk'd their narrow round, 

Nor made a pause, nor left a void ; 
And sure the eternal Master found 

His single talent well employ'd. 

The busy day, the peaceful night, 

Unfelt, uncounted, glided by ; 
His frame was firm, his eye was bright, 

Though now his eightieth year was nigh. 

Then, with no throbs of fiery pain, 

No cold gradations of decay. 
Death broke at once the vital chain. 

And freed his soul the easiest was. 

The last stanza smells somewhat of the country tombstone ; 
but to read the whole and to realise the deep, manly sentiment 
which it implies, without tears in one's eyes is to me at least impos- 
sible. 

There is one little touch which may be added before we pro- 
ceed to the closing years of this tender-hearted old moralist. John- 
son loved little children, calling them " little dears," and cramming 
them with sweetmeats, though we regret to add that he once snubbed 
a little child rather seveT-ely for a want of acquaintance with the 
Pilgrim'' s Progress. His cat, Hodge, should be famous amongst 
the lovers of the race. He used to go out and buy oysters for 
Hodge, that the servants might not take a dislike to the animal 
from having to serve it themselves. He reproached his wife for 
beating a cat before the maid lest she should give a precedent for 
cruelty. Boswell, who cherished an antipathy to cats, suffered as 
seeing Hodge scrambling up Johnson's breast, whilst ne smiled 
and robbed the beast's back and pulled its tail. Bozzj temarked 
that he was a fine cat. "Why, yes, sir," said Johnsc^ , "but I 
have had cats whom I liked better than this," and then, ::-Pt Hodge 
should be put out of countenance, he added, "but he is ? very fine 
cat, a very fine cat indeed." He told Langton once <:i a young 
gentleman, who, when last heard of, was " running \b6ut town 
shooting cats ; but," he murmured in a kindly reve.-'>e, " Hodge 
shan't be shot ; no, no, Hodge shnll not be shot!" Once, when 
Johnson was staying at a house in Vy'ales, the gardener brought in 
a hare which had been caught in the potatoes. The order was 
given to take it to the cook. Johnson asked to have it placed in 
his arms. He took it to the window and let it go, shouting to in« 



94 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

crease its speed. When his host complained that he had perhaps 
spoilt the dinner, Johnson replied by insisting that the rights of 
hospitality included an animal which had thus placed itself under 
the protection of the master of the garden. 

We must proceed, however, to a more serious event. • The 
year 1781 brought with it a catastrophe which profoundly affected 
the brief remainder of Johnson's life Mr.. Thrale, whose health had 
been shaken by fits, died suddenly on the 4th of April. The ulti- 
mate consequence was Johnson'.s lossof the second home, in which 
he had so often found refuge from melancholy, alleviation of phy- 
sical suffering, and pleasure in social converse. The change did not 
follow at once, but as the catastrophe of a little social drama, upon 
the rights and wrongs of which a good deal of controversy has 
been expended. 

Johnson was deeply affected by the loss of a friend whose face, 
as he said, " had never been turned upon him through fifteen years 
but with respect and benignity." He wrote solemn and affecting 
letters to the widow, and busied himself strenuously in her service. 
Thrale had made him one of his executors, leaving him a small 
legacy ; and Johnson took, it seems, a rather simple-minded pleas- 
ure in dealing with important commercial affairs and signing 
cheques for large sums of more. The old man of letters, to wliom 
three hundred a year had been superabundant wenlth, was amused 
at findmg himself in the position of a man of business, regulating 
what was then regarded as a princely fortune. The brewery was 
sold after a time, and Johnson bustled about with an ink-horn and 
pen in his button-hole. When asked what was the value of the 
property, he replied magniloquenity, " We are not here to sell a 
parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich be- 
yond the dreams of avarice." The brewery was in fact sold to 
Barclay, Perkins, and Co. for the sum of 135,000/., and some years 
afterwards it was the largest concern of the kind in the world. 

The first effect of the change was probably rather to tighten 
than to relax the bond of union with the Tlirale family. During 
the winter of 1 781-2, Johnson's infirmities were growing upon him. 
In the beginning of 1782 he was suffering from an illness which ex- 
cited serious apprehensions, and he went to Mrs. Thrale's, as the 
only house where he cculd use "all the freedom that sickness re- 
quires." She nursed him carefully, and expressed her feelings 
with characteristic vehemence in a curious journal which he had 
encouraged her to keep. It records her opinions about her affairs 
and her family, with a frankness remarkable even in writing in- 
tended for no eye but her own. " Here is. Mr. Johnson very ill," 
she writes on the ist of February; .... "What shall we do for 
him? If I lose him, I am more than undone — friend, father, guar- 
dian, confidant ! God give me health and patience ! What shall 
I do ? " There is no reason to doubt the sincerity, thougii they 
seem to represent a mood of excitement. They show that for ten 
months after Thrale's death Mrs. Thrale was keenly sensitive to 
the value of Johnson's friendship. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 95 

A change, however, was approaching. Towards the end of 
1780 Mrs. Thrale had made the acquaintance of an Italian musi- 
cian named Piozzi, a man of amiable and honourable character, 
making an independent income by his profession, but to the eyes 
of most people rather inoffensive than specially attractive. The 
friendship between Mrs. Thrale and Piozzi rapidly became closer, 
and by the end of 1781 she was on very intimate terms with the 
gentleman whom she calls " my Piozzi." He had been making a 
professional trip to the Continent during part of the period since 
her husband's death, and upon his return in November, Johnson 
congratulated her upon having two friends who loved her, in terms 
which suggest no existing feeling of jealousy. During 1782 the 
mutual affection of the lady and the musician became stronger, and 
in the autumn they had avowed it to each other, and were discuss- 
ing the question of marriage. 

No one who has had some experience of life will be inclined to 
condemn INIrs. Thrale for her passion. Rather the capacity for a 
passion not excited by an intrinsically unworthy object should in- 
crease pur esteem for her. Her marriage with Thrale had been, 
as has been said, onf> of convenience ; and, though she bore him 
many children and di I her duty faithfully, she never loved him. 
Towards the end of his life he had made her jealous by very 
marked attentions lu the pretty and sentimental Sophy Streatfield, 
which once caused a scene at his table ; and during the last two 
years his mind had been weakened, and his conduct had caused 
her anxiety and discomfort. It is not surprising that she should 
welcome the warm and simple devotion of her new lover, though 
she was of a ripe age and the mother of grown-up daughters. 

It is, however, equally plain that an alliance with a foreign fid- 
dler was certain to shock British respectability. It is the old story 
of the quarrel between Philistia and Bohemia. Nor was respecta- 
bility without much to say for itself. Piozzi was a Catholic as well 
as a foreigner; to marry him was in all probability to bl'eak with 
daughters just growing into womanhood, whom it was obviously her 
first duty to protect. The marriage, therefore, might be regarded 
as not merely a revolt against conventional morality, but as leading 
to a desertion of country, religion, and family. Her children, her 
husband's friends, and her whole circle were certain to look upon 
the match with feelings of the strongest disapproval, and she ad- 
mitted to herself that the objections were founded upon something 
more weighty than a fear of the world's censure. 

Johnson, in particular, among whose virtues one cannot reckon 
a superiority to British prejudice, would inevitably consider the 
marriage as simply degrading. Foreseeing this, and wishing to 
avoid the pain of rejecting advice which she felt unable to accept, 
slie refrafned from retaining her " friend, father, and guardian " in 
the position of " contidant.'' Her situation in the summer of 1782 
was therefore exceedingly trying. She was unhappy at home. 
Her children, she complains, did not love her; her servants " de- 
voured " her \ her friends censured her ; and her expenses were ex-' 



g6 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

cessive, whilst the loss of a lawsuit strained her resources. John- 
son, sickly, suffering and descending into the gloom of approaching 
decay, was present like a charged thunder-cloud ready to burst at 
any moment, if she allowed him to approach the chief subject of 
her thoughts. Thougii not in love with Mrs. Thrale, he had a 
very intelligible feeling of jealousy towards any one who threatened 
to distract her allegiance. Under such circumstances we might 
expect the state of things which Miss Burney described long after- 
wards (though with some confusion of dates). Mrs. Thrale, she 
says, was absent and agitated, restless in manner, and hurried in 
speech, forcing smiles, and averting her eyes from her friends ; ne- 
glecting every one, including Johnson and excepting only Miss Bur- 
ney herself, to whom the secret was confided, and the situation there- 
fore explained. Gradually, according to Miss Burney, she became 
more petulant to Johnson'than she was herself aware, gave pal- 
pable hints of being worried by his company, and finally excited his 
resentment and suspicion. In one or two utterances, though he 
doubtless felt the expedience of reserve, he intrusted his forebod- 
ings to Miss Burney, and declared that Streatham was lost to him 
for ever. 

At last, in the end of August, the crisis came. Mrs. Thrale's 
lawsuit had gone against her. She thought it desirable to go 
abroad and save money. It had moreover been " long her dearest 
wish " to see Italy, with Piozzi for a guide. The one difficulty (as 
she says in her journal at the time), was that it seemed equally hard 
to part with Johnson or to take him with her till he had regained 
strengtlv At last, however, she took courage to confide to him her 
plans for travel. To her extreme annoyance he fully approved ot 
them. He advised her to go; anticipated her return in two or 
three years ; and told her daughter that he should not accompany 
them, even if invited. No behaviour, it may be admitted, could be 
more provoking than this unforeseen reasonableness. To nerve 
oneself to part with a friend, and to find the friend perfectly ready, 
and all your battery of argument thrown away is most vexatious. 
The poor man should have begged her to stay with him, or to take 
him with her; he should have made the scene which she professed 
to dread, but which would have been the best proof of her power. 
The only conclusion which could really have satisfied her — though 
she, in all probability, did not know it — would have been an out- 
burst which would have justified a rupture, and allowed her to pro- 
test against his tyranny as she now proceeded to protest against 
his complacency. 

Johnson wished to go to Italy two years later; and his present 
willingness to be left was probably caused by a growing sense of 
the dangers which threatened their friendship. Mrs. Thrale's anger 
appears in her journal. He had never really loved her, she declares ; 
his affection for her had been interested, though even in her wrath 
she admits that he really loved her husband ; he cared less for her 
conversation, which she had fancied necessary to his existence, 
than for her " roast beef and plumb pudden," which he now devours 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. gy 

too "dirtily for endurance." She was fully resolved to go. and yet 
she could not bear that her going should fail to torture the friend 
whom for eighteen years she had loved and cherished so kindly. 

No one has a right at once to insist upon the compliance of his 
friends, and to insist that it should be a painful compliance. Still 
Mrs. Thrale's petulant outburst was natural enough. It requires 
notice because her subsequent account of the rupture has given 
rise to attacks on Johnson's character. Her " Anecdotes," written 
in 1785, show that her real affection for Johnson was still coloured 
by resentment for his conduct at this and a later period. They 
have an apologetic character which shows itself in a statement as 
to the origin of the quarrel, curiously different from the contempo- 
rary accounts in the diary. She says substantially, and the whole 
book is written so as to give probability to the assertion, that John- 
son's bearishness and demands upon her indulgence had become 
intolerable, when he was no longer under restraint from her hus- 
band's presence. She therefore "took advantage " of her lost law- 
suit and other troubles to leave London, and thus escape from his 
domestic tyranny. He no longer, as she adds, suffered from any- 
thing but " old age and general infirmity " (a tolerably wide excep- 
tion !), and did not require her nursing. She therefore withdrew 
from the yoke to which she had contentedly submitted during her 
husband's life, but which was intolerable when her " coadjutor was 
no more." 

Johnson's society was, we may easily believe, very trying to a 
widow in such a position; and it seems to be true that Thrale was 
better able than Mrs. Thrale to restrain his oddities, little as the 
lady shrunk at times from reasonable plain-speaking. But the 
later account involves something more than a bare suppression of 
the truth. The excuse about his health is, perhaps, the worst part 
of her case, because obviously insincere. Nobody could be more 
fully aware than Mrs. Thrale that Johnson's infirmities were rapidly 
gathering, and that another winter or two must in all probability 
be fatal to him. She knew, therefore, that he was never more in 
want of the care which, as she seems to imply, had saved him from 
the specific tendency to something lik'e madness. She knew, in 
fact, that she was throwing him upon the care of his other friends, 
zealous and affectionate enough, it is true, but yet unable to supply 
him with the domestic comforts of Streatham. See clearly felt that 
this was a real injury, inevitable it might be under the circum- 
stances, but eertainly not to be extenuated by the paltry evasion 
as to his improved health. So far from Johnson's health being now 
established, she had not dared to speak until his temporary recov- 
ery from a dangerous illness, which had provoked her at the time 
to the strongest expressions of anxious regret. She had (according 
to the diar)') regarded a possible breaking of the yoke in the early 
part of 1782 as a terrible evil, which would "more than ruin her." 
Even when resolved to leave Streatham, her one great difficulty is 
the dread of parting with Johnson, and the pecuniary troubles are 
the solid and cox/clusive reason. In the later account the money 



gS SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

question is the mere pretext ; the desire to leave Johnson the true 
motive ; and the long-clierished desire to see Italy with Piozzi is 
judiciously dropped out oi notice altogether. 

The truth is plain enough. Mrs. Thrale was torn by conflicting 
feelings. She still loved Johnson, and yet dreaded his certain 
disapproval of her strongest wishes. She respected him, but was 
resolved not to follow his advice. She wished to treat him with 
kindness and to be repaid with gratitude, and yet his presence and 
his affection were full of intolerable inconveniences. When an old 
friendship becomes a burden, the smaller infirmities of manner and 
temper to which we once submitted willingly become intolerable. 
She had borne with Johnson's modes of eating and with his rough 
reproofs to herself and her friends during sixteen years of her 
married life ; and for nearly a year of her widowhood she still clung 
to him as the wisest and kindest of monitors. His manners had 
undergone no spasmodic change. They became intolerable when, 
for other reasons, she resented his possible interference, and wanted 
a very different guardian and confidant ; and, therefore, she v/ished 
to part, and yet wished that the initiative should come from him. 

The decision to leave Slreatham was taken. Johnson parted 
with deep regret from the house ; he read a chapter of the Testa- 
ment in the library ; he took leave of the church with a kiss; he 
composed a prayer commending the family to the protection of 
Heaven ; and he did not forget to note in his journal the details of 
the last dinner of which he partook. This quaint observation may 
have been due to some valetudinary motive, or, more probably, to 
some odd freak of association. Once, when eating an omelette, he ' 
was deeply affected because it recalled his old friend Nugent. 
"Ah, my dear friend," he said " in an agony," " I shall never eat 
omelette with thee again ! " And in the present case there is an 
obscure reference to some funeral connected in his mind with a 
meal. The unlucky entry has caused some ridicule, but need hardly 
convince us that his love of the family in which for so many years 
he had been an iionoured and honour-giving inmate was, as Miss 
Seward amiably suggests, in great measure " kitchen-love." 

No immediate rupture followed tlic abandonment of the Streat- 
ham establishment. Johnson spent some weeks at Brighton with 
Mrs. Thrale, during which a crisis was taking place, without his 
knowledge, in her relations to Piozzi. After vehement altercations 
with her daughters, whom she criticises with great bitterness for 
their utter want of heart, she resolved to break with Piozzi for at 
least a time. Her plan was to go to Bath, and there to retrench her 
expenses, in the hopes of being able to recall her lover at some future 
period. Meanwhile he left her and returned to Italy. After another 
winter in London, during which Johnson was still a frequent intimate 
of her house, she went to Bath with her daughter's in April, 1783. 
A melancholy period followed for both the friends. Mrs. Thrale 
lost a younger daughter, and Johnson had a paralytic stroke in June. 
Death was sending preliminary warnings. A correspondence was 
kept up, which implies that the "old terms were not ostensibly broken. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 99 

Mrs. Thrale speaks tartly more than once ; and Johnson's letters 
go into medical details with his customary plainness of speech, and 
he occasionally indulges in laments over the supposed change in 
her feelings. The gloom is thickening, and the old playful gallan- 
try has" died out. The old man evidently felt himself deserted, and 
suffered from the breaking-up of the asylum he had loved so well. 
The final catastrophe came in 1784, less than six months before 
Johnson's death. 

After much suffering in mind and body, Mrs. Thrale had at 
last induced her daughters to consent to her marriage with Piozzi. 
She sent for him at once, and they were married in June, 1784. 
A painful correspondence followed. Mrs. Thrale announced her 
marriage in a friendly letter to Johnson, excusing her previous silence . 
on the ground that discussion could only have caused them pain. 
The revelation, though Johnson could not have been quite unpre- 
pared, produced one of his bursts of fury. " Madam, if I interpret 
your letter rightly," wrote the old man, " you are ignominiously 
married. If it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If 
you have abandoned your children and your religion. God forgive 
your wickedness ! If you have forfeited your fame and your 
country, may your folly do no further mischief ! If the last act is 
yet to do, I, who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and 
served you — I, who long thought you the first of womankind — 
entreat that before your "fate is irrevocable, I may once more see 
3-ou ! I was, I once was, madam, most truly yours, Sam. Johnson." 

Mrs. Thrale replied with spirit and dignity to this cry of blind 
indignation, speaking of her husband with becoming pride, and re- 
senting the unfortunate phrase about her loss of " fame." She 
ended by declining further intercourse till Johnson could change 
his opinion of Piozzi. Johnson admitted in his reply that he had 
no right to resent her conduct ; expressed his gratitude for the kind- 
ness which had "soothe'd twenty years of a life radically wretched," 
and implored her ("superfluously," as she says) to induce Piozzi to 
settle in England. He then took leave of her with an expression 
of sad forebodings. Mrs. Thrale, now Mrs. Piozzi, says that she 
replied affectionately : but the letter is missing. The friendship 
was broken off, and during the brief remainder of Johnson's life, 
the Piozzis were absent from England. 

Of her there is little more to be said. After passing some time 
in Italy, where she became a light of that wretched little Delia 
Cruscan society of which some faint memory is preserved by Gif- 
ford's ridicule, now pretty nearly forgotten with its objects, she re- 
turned with her husband to England. Her anecdotes of Johnson, 
published soon after his death, had a success which, in spite of much 
ridicule, encouraged her to some further literary efforts of a sprightly 
but ephemeral kind. She lived happily with Piozzi, and never had 
cause to regret her marriage. She was reconciled to her daughters 
sufficiently to renew a friendly intercourse ; but the elder ones set 
up a separate establishment. Piozzi died not long afterwards. She 
was still a vivacious old lady, who celebrated her 80th birthday by 



lOo SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

a ball, and is supposed at that ripe age to have made an offer of 
marriage to a young actor. She died in May, 1821, leaving all that 
she could dispose of to a nephew of Piozzi's, who had been natural- 
ised in England. 

Meanwhile Johnson was rapidly approaching the grave. His 
old inmates, Levett and Miss Williams, had gone before him ; 
Goldsmith and Garrick and Beauclerk had become memories of 
the past; and the gloom gathered thickly around him. The old 
man clung to life "with pathetic earnestness. Though life had 
been often melancholy, he never affected to conceal the horror 
with which he regarded death. He frequently declared that death 
must be dreadful to every reasonable man. " Death, my dear, is 
very dreadful," he says simply in a letter to Lucy Porter in the 
last year of his life. Still later he shocked a pious friend by ad- 
mitting that the fear oppressed him. Dr. Adams tried the ordinary 
consolation of the divine goodness, and went so far as to suggest 
that hell might not imply much positive suffering. Johnson's relig- 
ious views were of a different colour. "I am afraid," he said, 
" I may be one of those who shall be damned." " What do you 
mean by damned ? " asked Adams. Johnson replied passionately 
and loudly, " Sent to hell, sir, and punished everlastingly." Re- 
monstrances only deepened his melancholy, and he silenced his 
friends by exclaiming in gloomy agitation, " Pll have no more 
on't ! " Often in these last years he was heard muttering to him- 
self the passionate complaint of Claudio, "Ah, but to die and go 
we know not whither ! " At other times he was speaking of some 
lost friend, and saying, " Poor man — and then he died ! " The 
peculiar horror of death, which seems to indicate a tinge of insanity, 
was combined with utter fearlessness of pain. He called to the 
surgeons to cut deeper when performing a painful operation, and 
shortly before his death inflicted such wounds upon liimself in 
hopes of obtaining relief as, very erroneously, to suggest the idea 
of suicide. Whilst his strengtii remained, he endeavoured to dis- 
perse melancholy by some of the old methods. In the winter of 
1783-4 he got together the few surviving members of the old Ivy 
Lane Club, which had flourislied wlien he was composing the Dic- 
tionary ; but the old place of meeting had vanished, most of the 
original members were dead, and the gathering can have been but 
melancholy. He started another club at the Essex Head, whose 
members were to meet twice a week, with the modest fine of three- 
pence for non-attendance. It appears to have included a rather 
" strange mixture " of people, and thereby to have given some 
scandal to Sir Jolin Hawkins and even to Reynolds. They thought 
that his craving for society, increased by his loss of Streatham, was 
leading him to undignified concessions. 

Amongst the members of the club, however, were such men as 
Horsley and Windham. Windham seems to have attracted more 
personal regard tlian most politicians, by a generous warmth of 
enthusiasm not too common in the class. In politics he was an 
ardent disciple of Burke's whom he afterwards followed in his sefh 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, I o i 

aration from the new Whigs. But, though adhering to the princi- 
ples which Johnson detested, he knew, like his preceptor, how to 
win Johnson's warmest regard. He was the most eminent of the 
younger generation who now looked up to Johnson as a venerable 
relic from the past. Another was young Burke, that very priggish 
and silly young man as he seems to have been, whose loss, none 
the less, broke the tender heart of his father. Friendships, now 
more interesting, were those with two of the most distinguished 
authoresses of the day. One of them was Hannah More, who was 
about this time coming to the conclusion that the talents which 
had gained her distinction in the literary and even in the dramatic 
world, should be consecrated to less secular employment. Her 
vivacity during the earlier years of their acquaintance exposed her 
to an occasional rebuff. " She does not gain upon me, sir ; I think 
her empty-headed," was one of his remarks ; and it was to her 
that he ,said, according to Mrs. Thrale, though Boswell reports a 
softened version of the remark, that she should "consider what her 
flattery was worth, before she choked him with it." More fre- 
quently, he seems to have repaid it in kind. " There was no name 
in poetry," he said, " which might not be glad to own her poem " — 
the Bus Bleu. Certainly Johnson did not stick at trifles in inter- 
course with his female friends. He was delighted, shortly before 
his death, to " gallant it about " with her at Oxford, and in serious 
moments showed a respectful regard for her merits. Hannah 
More, who thus sat at the feet of Johnson, encouraged the juvenile 
ambition of Macaulay, and did not die till the historian had grown 
into manhood and fame. The other friendship noticed was with 
Fanny Burney, who also lived to our own time. Johnson's affec- 
tion for this daughter of his friend seems to have been amongst the 
tenderest of his old age. When she was first introduced to him at 
the Thrales, she was overpowered and indeed had her head a little 
turned by flattery of the most agreeable kind that an author can. 
receive. The "great literary Leviathan" showed himself to have 
the recently published Evelina at his fingers' ends. He quoted, 
and almost acted passages. " La ! Polly ! " he exclaimed in a 
pert feminine accent, "only think ! Miss has danced with a lord ! " 
How many modern readers can assign its place to that quotation, 
or answer the question which poor Boswell asked in despair and 
amidst general ridicule for his ignorance, " What is a Brangton ? " 
There is something pleasant in the enthusiasm with which men 
like Johnson and Burke welcomed the literary achievements of the 
young lady, whose first novels seem to have made a sensation 
almost as lively as that produced by Miss Bronte, and far superior 
to anything that fell to the lot of Miss Austen. Johnson seems 
also to have regarded her with personal affection. He had a tender 
interview with her shortly before his death ; he begged her with 
solemn energy to remember him in her prayers ; he apologised 
pathetically for being unable to see her, as his weakness increased ; 
and sent her tender messages from his deathbed. 

As the end drew near, Johnson accepted the inevitable like a 



1 02 SA MUEL JOHNSON: 

man. After spending most of the latter months of 1784 in the 
country with the friends who, after the loss of the Thrales. could 
give him most domestic comfort, he came back to London to die. 
He made his will, and settled a few matters of business, and was 
pleased to be told that he would be buried in Westminster Abbey. 
He uttered a few words of solemn advice to those who came near 
him, and took affecting leave of his friends. Langton, so warmly 
loved, was in close attendance. Johnson said to him tenderly, Te 
ieneatn moriens deficiente inami. Windham broke from political 
occupations to sit by the dying man ; once Langton found Burke 
sitting by his bedside with three or four friends. " I am afraid," 
said Burke, " that so many of us must be oppressive to you." 
''No, sir, it is not so," replied Johnson, ''and I must be in a 
wretched state indeed when your company would not be a delight 
to me." " My dear sir," said Burke, with a breaking voice, "you 
have always been too good to me ;" and parted from his old friend 
for the last time. Of Reynolds, he begged three things : to for- 
give a debt of thirty pounds, to read the Bible, and never to paint 
on Sundays. A few flashes of the old humour broke through. He 
said of a man who sat up with him: " Sir, the fellow's an idiot; 
he's as awkward as a turnspit when first put into the wheel, and as 
sleepy as a dormouse." His last recorded words were to a you"ng 
lady who had begged for his blessing: "God bless you, my dear." 
The same day, December 13th, 1784, he gradually sank and died 
peacefully. He was laid in the Abbey by the side of Goldsmith, 
and the playful prediction has been amply fulfilled : — 

Forsitan at nostrum nomen miscebitur istis. 

The names of many greater writers are inscribed upon the walls 
of Westminster Abbey ; but scarcely any one lies there whose 
heart was more acutely responsive during life to the deepest and 
tenderest of human emotions. In visiting that strange gathering 
of departed heroes and statesmen and philanthropists and poets, 
there are many whose words and deeds have a far greater influence 
upon our imaginations ; but there are very few whom, when all has 
been said, we can love so heartily as Samuel Johnson. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 103 



CHAPTER VI, 

JOHNSON'S WRITINGS. 

It remains to speak of Johnson's position in literature. For 
reasons sufficiently obvious, few men whose lives have been de- 
voted to letters for an equal period, have left behind them such 
scanty and inadequate remains. Johnson, as we have seen, worked 
only under the pressure of circumstances ; a very small proportion 
of his latter life was devoted to literary employment. The work- 
ing hours of his earlier years were spent for the most part in pro- 
ductions which can hardly be called literary. Seven years were 
devoted to the Dictionary, which, whatever its merits, could be a 
book only in the material sense of the word, and was of course 
destined to be soon superseded. Much of his hack-work has 
doubtless passed into oblivion, and though the ordinary relic-wor- 
ship has gathered together fragments enough to fill twelve decent 
octavo volumes (to which may be added the two volumes of parlia- 
mentary reports), the part which can be called alive may be com- 
pressed into very moderate compass. Johnson may be considered 
as a poet, an essayist, a pamphleteer, a traveller, a critic, and a 
biographer. Among his poems, the two imitations of Juvenal, 
especially the Vanity of Human Wishes, and a minor fragment or 
two, probably deserve more respect than would be conceded to 
them by adherents of modern schools. His most ambitious work, 
Irene, can be read by men in whom a sense of duty has been ab- 
normally developed. Among the two hundred and odd essays of 
the Rambler, there is a fair proportion which will deserve, but will 
hardly obtain, respectful attention. Rasselas, one of the philo- 
sophical tales popular in the last century, gives the essence of 
much of the Rambler in a different form, and to these may be 
added the essay upon Soame Jenyns, which deals with the same 
absorbing question of human happiness. The political pamphlets, 
and tlie Jonrney to the Hebrides, have a certain historical interest ; 
but are otherwise readable only in particular passages. Much of 
his criticism is pretty nearly obsolete; but the child of his old age 
— \.\\Q. Lives of the Poets — a book in which criticism and biography 
are combined, is an admirable performance in spite of serious de- 
fects. It is the work that best reflects his mind, and intelligent 
readers who have once made its acquaintance, will be apt to turn 
it into a familiar companion. 



104 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

If it IS easy to assign the causes which limited the quantity of 
Johnson's work, it is more curious to inquire what was the quality 
which once gained for it so much authority, and which now seems 
to hav€ so far lost its savour. The peculiar style which is associ- 
ated with Johnson's name must count for something in both pro- 
cesses. The mannerism is strongly marked, and of course offen- 
sive ; for by "mannerism," as I understand the word, is meant the 
repetition of certain forms of language in obedience to blind habit 
and without reference to their propriety in the particular case. 
Johnson's sentences seem to be contorted, as his gigantic limbs 
used to twitch, by a kind of mechanical spasmodic action. The 
most obvious peculiarity is the tendency which he noticed himself, 
to " use too big words and too many of them." He had to explain 
to Miss Reynolds that the Shakesperian line, — ■ 

Vou must borrow me Garagautua's mouth, 

had been applied to him because he used " big words, which re- 
quire tlie mouth of a giant to pronounce them." It was not, how- 
ever, the mere b'gness of the words that distinguished his style, 
but a peculiar love of putting the abstract for the concrete, of 
using awkward inversions, and of balancing his sentences in a 
monotonous rhythm, which gives the appearance, as it sometimes 
corresponds to the reality, of elaborate logical discrimination. 
With all its faults the style has the merits of masculine directness. 
The inversions are not such as to complicate the construction. As 
Boswell remarks, he never uses a parenthesis ; and his style, 
though ponderous and wearisome, is as transparent as the smarter 
snipsnap of Macaulay. 

This singular mannerism appears in his earliest writings ; it is 
most marked at the time of the Rambler; whilst in the Ij'tcs of 
the Poets, although I think that the trick of inversion has become 
commoner, the other pecuHarities have been so far softened as (in 
my judgment, at least), to be inoffensive. It is perhaps needless 
to give examples of a tendency which marks almost every page of 
his writing. A passage or two from the Rambler may illustrate 
the quality of the style, and the oddity of the effect produced, when 
it is applied to topics of a trivial kind. The author of the Rambler 
is supposed to receive a remonstrance upon his excessive gravity 
from the lively Flirtilla, who wishes him to write in defence of 
masquerades. Conscious of his own incapacity, he applies to a 
man of " liigh reputation in gay life ; " who, on the fifth perusal of 
Flirtilla's letter breaks into a rapture, and declares that he is ready 
to devote iiimself to her service. . Here is part of the apostrophe 
put into the mouth of this brilliant rake. " Behold, Flirtilla, at 
thy feet a man grown gray in the study of those noble arts by 
which right and wrong may be confounded ; by which reason may 
be blinded, when we have a mind to escape from her inspection, 
and caprice and appetite instated in uncontrolled command and 
boundless dominion ! Such a casuist may surely engage with cer- 



SA MUEL JOHXSON. 1 05 

tainty of success in vindication of an entertainment which in an 
instant gives confidence to the timorous and kindles ardour in the 
cold, an entertainment where the vigilance of jealousy has so often 
been clouded, and the virgin is set free from the necessity of lan- 
guishing in silence ; where all the outworks of chastity are at once 
demolished ; where the heart is laid open without a blush ; where 
bashfulness may survive virtue, and no wish is crushed under the 
frown of modesty." 

Here is another passage, in which Johnson is speaking upon a 
topic more within his proper province ; and which contains sound 
sense under its weight of words. A man, he says, who reads a 
printed book, is often contented to be pleased without critical ex- 
amination. " But," he adds, " if the same man be called to con- 
sider the merit of a production yet unpublished, he brings an im 
agination heated with objections to passages which he has never 
yet heard; he invokes all the powers of criticism, and stores 
his memory with I'aste and Grace, Purity and Delicacy, Manners 
and Unities, sounds which having been once uttered by those that 
understood them, have been since re-echoed without meaning, and 
kept up to the disturbance of the world by constant repercussion 
from one coxcomb to another. He considers himself as obliged 
to show by some proof of his abilities, that he is not consulted to 
no purpose, and therefore watches every opening for objection, and 
looks round for every opportunity to propose some specious altera- 
tion. Such opportunities a very small degree of sagacity will ena- 
ble him to find, for in every work of imagination, the disposition of 
parts, the insertion of incidents, and use of decorations may be 
varied in a thousand ways with ecjual propriety; and, as in things 
nearly equal that will always seem best to every man which he him- 
self produces, the critic, whose business is only to propose without 
the care of execution, can never want the satisfaction of believing 
that he has suggested very important improvements, nor the power 
of enforcing his advice by arguments, which, as they appear con- 
vincing to himself, either his kindness or his vanity will press ob- 
stinately and importunately, without suspicion that he may possibly 
judge too hastily in favour of his own advice or inquiry whether the 
advantage of the new scheme be proportionate to the labour." We 
may still notice a " repercussion " of words from one coxcomb to 
another ; though somehow the words have been changed or trans- 
lated. 

Johnson's style is ch iricleristic of the individual and of the 
epoch. The preceding generation had exhibited the final triumph 
of common sense over the pedantry of a decaying scholasticism. 
The movements represented by Locke's philosophy, by the ration- 
alising school in theology, and by the so-called classicfsm of Pope 
and his followers, are different phases of the same impulse. The 
quality valued above all others in philosophy, literature, and art 
was clear, bright, common sense. To expel the mystery which had 
served as a cloak for charlatans was the great aim of the time, and 
the method was to appeal from the professors of exploded techni- 



lo6 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

calitie.s to the judgment of cultivated men of the world. Berkeley 
places his Utopia in happy climes, — 

Where nature guides, and virtue rules, 
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense 
The pedantry of courts and schools. 

Simplicity, clearness, directness are, therefore, the great virtues of 
thought and style. Berkeley, Addison, Pope, and Swift are the 
o;reat models of such excellence in various departments of literature. 

In the succeeding generation we become aware of a certain 
leaven of dissatisfaction with the aesthetic and intellectual code 
thus inherited. The supremacy of common sense, the superlative 
importance of clearness, is still fiilly acknowledged, but there is a 
growing undertone of dissent in form and substance. Attempts 
are made to restore philosophical conceptions assailed by Locke 
and his followers ; the rationalism of the deistic or semi-deistic 
writers is declared to be superficial; their optimistic theories disre- 
gard the dark side of nature, and provide no sufficient utterance 
for the sadness caused by the contemplation of human suffering; 
and the polished monotony of Pope's verses begins to pall upon 
those who shall tread in his steps. Some daring sceptics are even 
inquiring whether he is a poet at all. And simultaneously, though 
Addison is still a kind of sacred model, the best prose writers are 
beginning to aim at a more complex structure of sentence, fitted 
for the expression of a wider range of thought and emotion. 

Johnson, though no conscious revolutionist, shares this growing 
discontent. The Spectator is written in the language of the draw- 
ing-room and the coffee-house. Nothing is ever said which might 
nol pass in conversation between a couple of "wits," with, at most, 
some graceful indulgence in passing moods of solemn or tender 
sentiment. Johnson, though devoted to society in his own way, 
was anything but a producer of small talk. Society meant to him 
an escape from the gloom which beset him whenever he was aban- 
doned to his thoughts. Neither his education nor the manners ac- 
quired in Grub Street had qualified him to be an observer of those 
lighter foibles which were touched by Addison with so dexterous 
aliand. When he ventures upon such topics he flounders dread- 
fully, and rather reminds us of an artist who should attempt to 
paint miniatures with a mop. No man, indeed, took more of in- 
terest in what is called the science of human nature ; and, when 
roused by the stimulus of argument, he could talk, as has been 
shown, with almost unrivalled vigour and point. But his favourite 
topics are the deeper springs of character, rather than superficial 
peculiarities ; and his vigorous sayings are concentrated essence 
of strong sense and deep feeling, not dainty epigrams or graceful 
embodiments of delicate observation. Johnson was not, like some 
contemporary antiquarians, a systematic student of the Kngljsh 
literature of the preceding centuries, but he had a strong affection 
for some of its chief masterpieces. Burton's Anatomy of M elan- 



SAMUEL JOl I NSOI^. 107 

choly was, he declared, the only book which ever got him out o£ 
bed two hours sooner than he wished. Sir Thomas Browne was 
another congenial writer, who is supposed to have had some influ- 
ence upon his style. He never seems to have directly imitated any 
one, though some nonsense has been talked about his "forming a 
style ; " but it is probable that he felt a closer affinity to those old 
scholars, with their elaborate and ornate language and their deep 
and solemn tone of sentiment, than to the brilliant but compara- 
tively superficial writers of Queen Anne's time. He was, one may 
say, a scholar of the old tvpe, forced by circumstances upon the 
world, but always retaining'a sympathy for the scholar's life and 
temper. Accordingly, his style acquired something of the old 
elaboration, though the attempt to conform to the canons of a later 
age renders the structure disagreeably monotonous. His tendency 
to pomposity is not redeemed by the naivete ^iV^di spontaneity of his 
masters. 

The ififeriority of Johnson's written to his spoken utterances is 
indicative of his divided life. There are moments at which his 
writing takes the terse, vigorous tone of his talk. In his letters, 
such as those to Chesterfield and Macpherson, and in occasional 
passages of his pamphlets, we see that he could be pithy enough 
when he chose to descend from his Latinised abstractions to good 
concrete English ; but that is only when he becomes e.xcited. His 
face when in repose, we are told, appeared to be almost imbecile; 
he was constantly sunk in reveries, from wliich he was only roused 
by a challenge to conversation. In his writings, for the most part, 
we seem to be listening to the reverie rather than the talk ; we are 
overliearing a soliloquy in his studv, not a vigorous discussion over 
the twentieth cup of tea ; he is not fairly put upon his mettle, and 
is content to expound without enforcing. We seem to see a man, 
heavy-eyed, ponderous in his gestures, like some huge mechanism 
which grinds out a ponderous tissue of verbiage as heavy as it is 
certainly solid. 

The substance corresponds to the style. Johnson has some- 
thing in common with the fashionable pessimism of modern times. 
No sentimentalist of to-day could be more convinced that life is in 
the main miserable. It was his favourite theory, according to Mrs. 
Thrale, that all human action was prompted by the " vacuity of 
life." Men act solely in the hope of escaping from themselves. 
Evil, as a follower of Schopenhauer would assert, is tlie positive, 
and good merely the negative of evil. All desire is at bottom an 
attempt to escape from pain. The doctrine neither resulted from, 
nor generated, a philosophical theory in Johnson's case, and was 
in the main a generalisation of his own experience. Not the less, 
the aim of most of his writing is to express this sentiment in one 
form or other. He differs, indeed, from most modern sentiment- 
alists, in having the most hearty contempt for useless whining. If 
he dwells upon himian misery, it is because he feels that it is as 
futile to join with the optimist in ignoring, as with the pessimist in 
howling over the evil. We are in a sad world, full of pain, but we 



1 08 'S'.^ MUEL JOHNSON. 

have to make the best of it. Stubborn patience and hard work are 
the sole remedies, or rather liie sole means of temporary escape. 
Much of the Rai?ibler is occupied with variations upon this theme, 
and expresses the kind of dogged resolution with which he wouW 
have us plod through this weary world. Take for example this 
passage ; — " The controversy about the reality of external evils is 
now at an end. That life has many miseries, and that those miseries 
are sometimes at least equal to all the powers of fortitude is now 
universally confessed ; and, therefore, it is useful to consider not- 
only how we may escape them, but by what means those which either 
the accidents of affairs or the infirmities of nature must bring upon 
us may be mitigated and lightened, and how we may make those 
hours less wretched which the condition of our present exis'tence 
will not allow to be very happy. 

" The cure for the greatest part of hum.m miseries is not radi- 
cal, but palliative. Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and 
interwoven 'ivith our being; all attempts, therefore, to decline it 
wholly are useless and vain ; the armies of pain send their arrows 
against us on every side, the choice is only between those which 
are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less 
malignity ; and the strongest armour which reason can supply will 
only blunt their points, but cannot repel them. 

" Tlie grea^t remedy which Heaven has put in our hands is 
patience, by which, though we cannot lessen the torments of the 
body, we can in a great measure preserve the peace of the mind, 
and shall suffer only the natural and genuine force of an evil, with- 
out heightening its acrimony or prolonging its effects." 

It is hardly desirable for a moralist to aim at originality in his 
precepts. We must be content if he enforces old truths in such a 
manner as to convince us of the depth and sincerity of his feeling. 
Johnson, it must be confessed, rather abuses the moralist's privi- 
lege of being commonplace. He descants not unfrequently upon 
propositions so trite that even the most earnest enforcement can 
give them little interest. With all drawbacks, however, the moral- 
ising is the best part of the Rambler. Many of the papers follow 
the precedent set by Addison in the Spectator, but without Addi- 
son's felicity. Like Addison, he indulges in allegory, which, in his 
hands, becomes unendurably frigid and clumsy ; he tries light 
social satire, and is fain in confess that we can spy a beard under 
the muffler of his feminine characters ; he treats us to criticism 
which, like .•Addison's, goes upon exploded principles, but unlike 
Addison's, is apt to be almost wilfully outrageous. His odd re- 
marks upon Milton's versification are the worst example of this 
weakness. The result is what one might expect from the attempt 
of a writer without an ear to sit in judgment upon the greatest 
master of harmony in the language. 

These defects have consigned the Rambler to the dustiest 
shelves of libraries, an account for the wonder expressed by such a 
critic as M. Taine at the English love of Jofinson. Certainly if 
that love were nourished, as he seems to fancy, by assiduous study 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. T05 

of the Rambler., it would be a curious phenomenon. And yet with 
all its faults, the reader who can plod through its pages will at least 
feel respect for the author. It is not unworthy of the man whose 
great lesson is "clear your mind of cant;"* who felt most deeply 
the misery of the world, but from the bottom of his heart despised 
querulous and sentimental complaints on one side, and optimist 
glasses upon the other. To him, as to some others of his tempera- 
ment, the affectation of looking at the bright side of things seems 
to have presented itself as the bitterest of mockeries ; and nothing 
would tempt him to let fine words pass themselves off for genuine 
sense. Here are some remarks upon the vanity in whicli some 
authors seek for consolation, which may illustrate this love of 
realities and conclude our quotations from the Rambler. 

"By such acts of voluntary delusion does every man endeavour 
to conceal his own unimportance from himself. It is long before 
we are convinced of the small proportion which every individual 
bears to the collective body of mankind ; or learn how few can be 
interested in the fortune of any single man ; how little vacancy is 
left in the world for any new object otf attention ; to how small ex- 
tent the brightest blaze of merit can be spread amidst the mists of 
business and of folly ; and how soon it is clouded by tlie interven- 
tion of other novelties. Not only the writer of books, but the com- 
mander of armies, and the deliverer of nations, will easily outlive 
all noisy and popular reputation : he maybe celebrated for a time by 
the public voice, but liis actions and his name will soon be considered 
as remote and unaffecting, and be rarely mentioned but by those 
whose alliance gives them some vanity to gratify by frequent com- 
memoration. It seems not to be sufficiently considerecl how little 
renown can be admitted in the world. Mankind are kept perpetu- 
ally busy by their fears or desires, and have not more leisure from 
their own affairs than to acquaint themselves with the accidents of 
the current day. Engaged in contriving some refuge from calamity, 
or in shortening their way to some new possession, they seldom 
suffer their thoughts to wander to the past or future ; none but a 
few solitary students have leisure to inquire into the claims of 
ancient heroes or sages ; and names which hoped to range over 
kingdoms and continents shrink at last into cloisters and colleges. 
Nor is it certain that even of these dark and narrow habitations, 
these last retreats of fame, the possession will be long kept. Of 
men devoted to literature very few extend their views beyond some 
particular science, and the greater part seldom inquire, even in 
their own profession, for any authors but those whom the present 
mode of study happens to force upon their notice ; they desire not 
to fill their minds with unfashionable knowledge, but contentedly 

* Of this well-known sentiment it may be said, as of some other familiar quotations, 
that its direct meaning has been sliglitly modified in use. The eniplnsis is changed. 
Johnson's words were " Clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do ; you 
may say to a man, sir, I am your humble servant ; you are not his most humble servant- 
. ._ . You may ifd/A in this manner ; it is a mode of talking in society ; but don't M/«< 
foolishly." 



1 1 o SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

resign t© oblivion those books which they now find censured oi 
neglected." 

The most remarkable of Johnson's utterances upon his favourite 
topic of the Vanity of Human Wishes is the story of Rasselas 
The plan of the book is simple, and recalls certain parts of Vol- 
taire's simultaneous but incomparably more brilliant attack upon 
Optimism in Caiidide. There is supposed to be a happy valley in 
Abyssinia where the royal princes are confined in total seclusion, 
but with ample supplies for every conceivable want. Rasselas, who 
has been thus educated, becomes curious as to the outside world, 
and at last hiakes his escape with his sister, her attendant, and the 
ancient sage and poet, Imlac. Under Imlac's guidance they sur- 
vey life and manners in various stations ; they make the acquaint- 
ance of philosophers, statesmen, men of the world, and recluses ; 
they discuss the results of their experience pretty much in the 
style of the Rambler j they agree to pronounce the sentence 
"Vanity of Vanities ! " and finally, in a " conclusion where nothing 
is concluded," they resolve to return to the happy valley. The 
book is little more than a seJ of essays upon life, with just story 
enough to hold it together. It is wanting in those brilliant flashes 
of epigram, which illustrate Voltaire's pages so as to blind some 
readers to its real force of sentiment, and yet it leaves a peculiar 
and powerful impression upon the reader. 

The general tone maybe collected from a few passages. Here 
is a fragment, the conclusion of which is perhaps the most familiar 
of quotations from Johnson's writings. Imlac in narrating his life 
describes his attempts to become a poet. 

"The business of a poet," said Imlac, "is to examine not the 
individual, but the species ; to remark general properties and 
large appearances; he does not number the streaks of the tulip oi 
describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is 
to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking 
features as recall the original to every mind ; and must neglect the 
minute discriminations which one may have remarked, and another 
have neglected for those characteristics which are alike obvious to 
vigilance and carelessness." 

" But the knowledge of nature is onl)^ half the task of a poet ; 
he must be acquainted likewise with all the modes of life. His 
cliaracter requires that he estimate the happiness and misery of 
every condition; observe the power of all the passions in all their 
combinations, and know the changes of the human mind as they 
are modified by various institutions, and accidental influences of 
climate or custom, from the sprightliness of infancy to the despond- 
ency of decrepitude. He must divest himself of the prejudices of 
his age or country ; he must consider right and wrong in ihcir ab- 
stracted and invariable state ; he must disregard present laws and 
opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will 
always be the same ; he must therefore content himself with the 
slow progress of his name : contemn the applause of his own time, 
jind commit his claims to the justice of posterity. He must write 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 1 1 j 

as the interpreter of nature and the legislator of mankind, and con- 
sider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future 
generations, as a being superior to time and place. 

" His labours are not yet at an end ; he must know many lan- 
guages and many sciences ; and that his style may be worthy of 
his thoughts, must by incessant practice familiarise to himself every 
delicacy of speech and grace of harmony." 

Imlac now felt the enthusiastic fit and was proceeding to ag- 
,<;;nindise his profession, when the prince cried out, " Enough, thou 
iiast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet." 

Indeed, Johnson's conception of poetry is not the one which is 
now fashionable, and which would rather seem to imply that philo- 
sophical power and moral sensibility are so far disqualifications to 
the true poet. 

Here, again, is a view of the superfine system of moral philos- 
ophy. A meeting of learned men is discussing the ever-recurring 
problem of happiness, and one of them speaks as follows: — 

" The way to be happy is to live according to nature, in obedi- 
ence to that universal and unalterable law with whicli every heart 
is originally impressed ; which is not written on it by precept, but 
engraven by destiny, not instilled by education, but infused at our 
nativity. He that lives according to nature will suffer nothing from 
the delusions of hope, or importunities of desire ; he will receive and 
reject with equability of temper, and act or suffer as the reason of 
things shall alternately prescribe. Other men may amuse them- 
selves with subtle definitions or intricate ratiocinations. Let him 
learn to be wise by easier means : let him observe the hind of the 
forest, and the linnet of the grove ; let him consider the life of 
animals whose motions are regulated by instinct ; they obey their 
guide and are happy. 

" Let us, therefore, at length cease to dispute, and learn to live ; 
throw away the incumbrance of precepts, which they who litter 
them with so much pride and pomp do not understand, and carry 
with us this simple and intelligible maxim, that deviation from na- 
ture is deviation from happiness." 

The prince modestly inquires what is the precise meaning of 
the advice just given. 

"When I find young men so humble and so docile," said the 
philosopher, " I can deny them no information which my studies 
have enabled me to afford. To live according to nature, is to 
act always with due regard to the fitness arising from the relations 
and qualities of causes and effects, to concur with the great and 
unchangeable scheme of universal felicity ; to co-operate with the 
general disposition and tendency of the present system of things. 

" The prince soon found that this was one of the sages, whom 
he should understand less as he heard him longer." 

Here, finally, is a characteristic reflection upon the right mode 
of meeting sorrow. 

"The state of a mind oppressed with a sudden calamity," said 
Imlac, "is like that of the fabulous inhabitants of the new created 



1 1 2 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

earth, who, when the first night came upon them, supposed that 
day would never return. • When the clouds of sorrow gather over 
us, we see nothing beyond them, nor can imagine how they will be 
dispelled ; yet a new day succeeded to the night, and sorrow is 
never long without a dawn of ease. But they who restrain them- 
selves from receiving comfort, do as the savages would have done, 
had they put out their eyes when it was dark. Our minds, like our 
bodies, are in continual flux ; something is hourly lost, and some- 
thing acquired. To lose much at once is inconvenient to either, 
but while the vital powers remain uninjured, nature will find the 
means of reparation. 

" Distance has the same effect on the. mind as on the eye, and 
while we glide along the stream of time, whatever we leave behind 
us is always lessening, and that which we approach increasing in 
magnitude. Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for 
want of motion ; commit yourself again to the current of the world ; 
Pekuah will vanish by degrees ; you will meet in your way some 
other favourite, or learn to diffuse yourself in general conversation." 

In one respect Rasselas is curiously contrasted with Candide. 
Voltaire's story is aimed at the doctrine of theological optimism, 
and, whether that doctrine be well or ill understood, has therefore 
an openly sceptical tendency. Johnson, to whom nothing could be 
more abhorrent than an alliance with any assailant of orthodoxy, 
draws no inference from his pessimism. He is content to state the 
fact of human mjsery without perplexing him§elf with the resulting 
problem as to the final cause of human existence. If the question 
had been explicitly brought before him, he would, doubtless, have 
replied that the mystery was insoluble. To answer either in the 
sceptical or the optimistic sense was equally presumptuous. John- 
son's religious beliefs in fact were not such as to suggest that kind 
of comfort which is to be obtained by explaining away the exist- 
ence of evil. If he, too, would have said that in some sense all 
must be for the best in a -world ruled by a perfect Creator, the 
sense must be one which would allow of the eternal misery of in- 
definite multitudes of his creatures. 

But, in truth, it was characteristic of Johnson to turn away his 
mind from such topics. He was interested in ethical speculations, 
but on the practical side, in the application to life, not in the phi- 
losophy on which it might be grounded. In that direction he could 
see nothing. but a " milking of the bull" — a fruitless or rather a 
pernicious waste of intellect. An intense conviction of the supreme 
importance of a moral guidance in this difficult world, made him 
abhor any rash inquiries by which the basis of existing authority 
might be endangered. 

This sentiment is involved in many of those prejudices which 
have been so much, and in some sense justifiably ridiculed. Man 
has been wretched and foolish since the race began, and will be 
till it ends ; one chorus of lamentation has^ ever been rising, in 
countless dialects but with a single meaning; the plausible schemes 
of philo.sophers give no solution to the everlasting riddle ; the nos- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON: 1 1 3 

triims of politicians touch only the surface of the deeply-rooted 
evil ; it is folly to be querulous, and as silly to fancy that men are 
growing worse, as that they are mucl: better than they used to be. 
The evils under which we suffer are not skin deep, to be eradicated 
by changing the old physicians for new quacks. What is to be 
done under such conditions, but to hold fast as vigorously as we 
can to the rules of life and faith which have served our ancestors, 
and which, whatever their justifications, are at least the only con- 
solation, because they supply the only guidance through this lab}- 
rinth of troubles ? Macaula}' has ridiculed Johnson for what he 
takes to be the ludicrous inconsistency of his intense political prej- 
udice, combined with his assertion of the indifference of all forms 
of government. "If," says Macaulay, "the difference between 
two forms of government be not worth half a guinea, it is not easy 
to see how Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or the Crown can 
have too little power." The answer is surely obvious. Whiggism 
is vile, according to the doctor's phrase, because Whiggism is a 
" negation of all principle ; " it is in his view, not so much the pref- 
erence of one form to another, as an attack upon the vital condi- 
tion of all government. He called Burke a " bottomless Whig " in 
this sense, implying that Whiggism meant anarchy ; and in the 
next generation a good many people were led, rightly or wrongly, 
to agree with him by the experience of the French revolution. 

This dogged conservatism has both its value and its grotesque 
side. When Johnson came to write political pamphlets in his later 
years, and to deal with subjects little familiar to his mind, the re- 
sults were grotesque enough. Loving authority, and holding one 
authority to be as good as another, he defended with uncomprom- 
ising zeal the most preposterous and tyrannical measures. The 
pamphlets against the Wilkite agitators and the American rebels are 
little more than a huge " rhinoceros " snort of contempt against all 
who are fools enough (fc wicked enough to promote war and disturb- 
ance in order to change one form of authority for another. Here 
is a characteristic passage, giving his view of the value of such de- 
monstrators : — 

"The progress of a petition is well known. An ejected place- 
man goes down to his county or his borough, tells his friends of 
his inability to serve them and his constituents, of the corruption 
of the government. His friends readily understand that he who 
can get nothing, will have nothing to give. They agree to proclaim 
a meeting. Meat and drink are plentifully provided, a crowd is 
easily brought together, and those who think that they know the 
reason of the meeting undertake to tell those who know it not. 
Ale and clamour unite their powers ; the crowd, condensed and 
heated, begin to ferment with the leaven of sedition. All see a 
thousand evils, though they cannot suow them, and grow impatient 
for a remed}', though they know not what. 

" A speech is then made by the Cicero of the day ; he says 
much and suppresses more, and credit is equally given to what he 
tells and what he conceals. The petition is heard and universally 



, 1 4 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

approved. Those who are sober enough to write, add their names, 
and the rest would sign it if they could. 

" Every man goes home and tells his neighbour of the glories of 
the day ; how he was consulted, and what he advised ; how he was 
invited into the great room, where his lordship called him by his 
name; how he was caressed by Sir Francis, Sir Joseph, and Sir 
Georo-e ; how he ate turtle and venison, and drank unanimity to the 
three brothers. 

" The poor loiterer, whose shop had confined him or whose 
wife had locked him up, hears the tale of luxury with envy, and at 
last inquires what was their petition. Of the petition nothing is 
remembered by the narrator, but that it spoke much of fears and 
apprehensions 'and something very alarming, but that he is sure it 
is against the government. 

" The other is convinced that it must be right, and wishes ho 
had been there, for he loves wine and venison, and resolves as long 
as he lives to be against the government. 

" The petition is then handed from town to town, and from 
house to house ; and wherever it comes, the inhabitants flock to- 
gether that they may see that which must be sent to the king. 
Names are easily collected. One man signs because he hates the 
papists ; another because he has vowed destruction to the turn- 
pikes ; one because it will vex the parson ; another because he 
owes his landlord nothing ; one because he is rich ; another because 
he is poor ; one to show that he is not afraid ; and another to show 
that he can write." 

The only writing in which we see a distinct reflection of John- 
son's talk is the Lives of tlie Poets. The excellence of that book 
is of the same kind as the excellence of his conversation. Johnson 
wrote it -under pressure, and it has suffered from his characteristic 
indolence. Modern authors would fill as many pages as Johnson 
has filled lines, with the biographies of some of his heroes. By 
industriously sweeping together all the rubbish which is in any way 
connected with the great man, by elaborately discussing the pos- 
sible significance of infinitesimal bits of evidence, and by disqui- 
sition upon general principles or the whole mass of contemporary 
literature, it is easy to swell volumes to any desired extent. The 
result is sometimes highly interesting and valuable, as it is some- 
times a new contribution to the dust-heaps ; but in any case the 
design is something quite different from Johnson's. He has left 
much to be supplied and corrected by later scholars. His aim is 
simply to give a vigorous summary of the main facts of his hemes' 
lives, a pithy analysis of their character, and a short criticism of 
their productions. The strong sense which is everywhere dis- 
played, the massive style, which is yet easier and less combrous 
than in his earlier work, and the uprightness and independence of 
the judgments, make the book agreeable even where we are most 
inclined to dissent from its conclusions. 

The criticism is that of a school which has died out under the 
great revolution of modern taste. The booksellers decided that 



SAMUEL JOHNSOiV. n^ 

English poetry began for their purposes with Cowley, and Johnson 
has, therefore, nothing to say about some of the greatest names in 
our Hterature The loss is little to be regretted, since the biograph- 
ical part of earlier memoirs must have been scant}', and the criti- 
cism inappreciative. Johnson, it may be said, like most of his 
contemporaries, considered poetry almost exclusively from the 
didactic and logical point of view. He always inquires what is the 
moral of a work of art. If he does not precisely ask "what it 
proves," he pays excessive attention to the logical solidity and co- 
herence of its sentiments. He condemns not only insincerity and 
affectation of feeling, but all such poetic imagery as does not cor- 
respond to the actual prosaic belief of the writer. For the purely 
musical effects of poetry he has little or no feeling, and allows little 
deviation from the alternate long and short syllables neatly bound 
in Pope's couplets. 

To many readers this would imply that Johnson omits precisely 
the poetic element in poetry. I must be here content to say that 
in my opinion it implies rather a limitation than a fundamental 
error. Johnson errs in supposing that his logical tests are at all 
adequate ; but it is, I think, a still greater error to assume that 
poetry has no connexion, because it has not this kind of connexion, 
with philosophy. His criticism has always a meaning, and in the 
case of works belonging to his own school a very sound meaning. 
When he is speaking of other poetry, we can only reply that his 
remarks may be true, but that they are not to the purpose. 

The remarks on the poetry of Dryden, Addison, and Pope are 
generally excellent, and always give the genuine expression of an 
independent judgment. Whoever thinks for himself,' and says 
plainly what he thinks, has some merit as a critic. This, it is true, 
is about all that can be said for such criticism as that on Lycidas, 
which is a delicious example of the wrong way of applying strong 
sense to inappropriate topics. Nothing can be truer in a sense, 
and nothing less relevant. 

"In this poem," he says, "there is no nature, for there is no 
truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that 
of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting ; whatever 
images it can supply are easily exhausted, and its inherent improb- 
ability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind. When Cowley 
tells of Hervey that they studied together, it is easy to suppose 
how much he must miss the companion of his labours and the part- 
ner of his discoveries ; but what image of tenderness can be excited 
by these lines ? — 

We drove afield, and both together heard 
What time the gray fly winds her sultry horn, 
Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night. 

We know that they never drove a-field and had no flocks to 
batten ; and though it be allowed that the representation may be 
allegorical, the true meaning is sO uncertain and remote that it is 
never sought, because it cannot be known when it is found. 



Il6 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen 
deities : Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and ^Eolus, with a long train 
of mythological imagery such as a college easily supplies. Noth- 
ing can less display knowledge or less exercise invention than to 
tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed 
his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; how one 
god asks another god what has become of Lycidae, and neither god 
can tell. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy ; he who 
thus praises will confer no honour." 

This is of course utterly outrageous, and yet much of it is un- 
deniably true. To explain why, in spite of truth, Lycidas is a 
wonderful poem, would be to go pretty deeply into the theory of 
poetic expression. Most critics prefer simply to shriek, being 
at any rate safe from the errors of independent judgment. 

The general effect of the book, however, is not to be inferred 
from this or some other passages of antiquated and eccentric 
criticism. It is the shrewd sense everywhere cropping up which 
is really delightful. The keen remarks upon life and character, 
though, perhaps, rather too severe in tone, are worthy of a vigorous 
mind, stored with much experience of many classes, and braced by 
constant exercise in the conversational arena. Passages every- 
where abound which, though a little more formal in expression, 
have the forcible touch of his best conversational sallies. Some of 
the prejudices, which are expressed more pithily in Boswell, are 
defended by a reasoned exposition in the Lives. Sentence is 
passed with the true judicial air ; and if he does not convince' us 
of his complete impartiality, he at least bases his decisions upon 
solid and worthy grounds. It would be too much, for example, to 
expect that Johnson should sympathise with the grand republican- 
ism of Milton, or pardon a man who defended the execution of the 
blessed Martyr. He failed, therefore, to satisfy the ardent admirers 
of the great poet. Yet his judgment is not harsh or ungenerous, 
but, at worst, tlie judgment of a man striving to be just, in spite of 
some inevitable want of sympathy. 

The quality of Johnson's incidental remarks may be inferred 
from one or two brief extracts. Here is an observation which 
Johnson must have had many chances of verifying. Speaking of 
Dryden's monc\ difficulties, he says, "It is well known that he 
seldom lives frugally who iives by chance. Hope is always liberal, 
and they that trust her promises, make little scruple of revelling to- 
day on the profits of the morrow." 

Here is another shrewd comment upon the compliments paid to 
Halifax, of whom Pope says in the character of Bufo, — - 

Fed with soft dedications all day long, 
Horace and he went hand and hand in song. 

•To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, or to 
suppose that the economist always kno\is and feels the falsehoods 
of his assertions, is surely to discover great ignorance of human 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 1 1 7 

nature and of human life. In determinations, depending not on 
rules, but on reference and comparison, judgment is always in some 
deo-ree subject to affection. Very near to admiration is the wish to. 
admire. 

•' Every man willingly gives value to the praise which he receives, 
and considers the sentence passed in his favour as the sentence of 
discernment. We admire in a friend that understanding that 
selected us for confidence; we admire more in a patron that bounty 
which, instead of scattering bounty indiscriminately, directed it to 
us ; and if the patron be an author, those performances which 
gratitude forbids us to blame, affection will easily dispose us to 
exalt. 

" To these prejudices, hardly culpable, interest adds a power 
always operating, though not always,because not willingly, perceived. 
Tiie modesty of praise gradually wears away ; and, perhaps, the 
pride of patronage may be in time so increased that modest praise 
will no longer please. 

" Many a blandishment was practised upon Halifax, which he 
would never have known had he no other attractions than those of 
his poetry, of which a short time has withered the' beauties. It 
would now be esteemed no honour by a contributor to the monthly 
bundles of verses, to be told that, in strains either familiar or 
solemn, he sings like Halifax." 

I will venture to make a longer quotation from the life of Pope, 
which gives, I think, a good impression of his manner: — 

"Of his social qualities, if an estimate be made from his letters, 
an opinion too favourable cannot easily be formed; they exhibit a 
pei'petual and unclouded effulgence of general benevolence and 
particular fondness. There is nothing but liberality, gratitude, con- 
stancy, and tenderness. It has been so long said as to be com- 
monly believed, that the true characters of men may be found in 
their letters, and that he who writes to his friends lays his heart 
open before him. 

"But the truth is, tliat such were the simple friendships of the 
Golden Age, and are now the friendships only of children. Very 
few" can boast of hearts which they dare lay open to themselves, 
and of which, by whatever accident exposed, they do not shun a 
distinct and continued view ; and certainly what we hide from our- 
selves, we do not show to our friends. There is, indeed, no trans- 
action which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistica- 
tion than epistolary intercourse. 

" In the eagerness of conversation, the first emotions of the mind 
often burst out before they are considered. In the tumult of 
business, interest and jDassion have their genuine effect; but a 
friendly letter is a calm and deliberate perforrnance in the cool oi 
leisure, in the stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down by 
design to depreciate his own' character. 

" Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity; for by whom 
can a man so much wish to be thought better than he is, as by him 
whose kindness he desires to gain or keep? Even in writing to 



1 1 g SA MUEL JOHNSON. 

the world there is less constraint ; the author is not confronted 
with his reader, and takes his chance of approbation among the 
different dispositions of mankind : but a letter is addressed to a 
single mind, of which tiie prejudices and partialities are known, 
and must therefore please, if not by favouring them, by forbearing 
to oppose them. To charge those favourable representations 
which men give of their own minds with the guilt of hypocritical 
falsehood, would show more severity than knowledge. The writer 
commonly believes himself. Almost every man's thoughts while 
they are general are right, and most hearts are pure while tempta- 
tion is away. It is easy to awaken generous sentiments in privacy ; 
to despise death when there is no danger ; to glow with benevolence 
when there is nothing to be given. While such ideas are formed 
they are felt, and self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to 
be the meteor of fancy. 

" If the letters of Pope are considered merely as compositions, 
they seem to be premeditated and artificial. It is one thing to 
write, because there is something which the mind wishes to dis- 
charge ; and another to solicit the imagination, because ceremony 
or vanity requires something to be written. Pope confesses his 
early letters to be vitiated with affectation and ambition. To know 
whether he disentangles himself from these perverters of epistolary 
integrity, his book and his life must be set in comparison. One of 
his favourite topics is contempt of his own poetry. For this, if it 
had been real, he would deserve no commendation ; and in this he 
was certainly not sincere, for his high value of himself was suffi- 
' ciently observed ; and of what could he be proud but of his poetr.y ? 
He writes, he says, when 'he has just nothing else to do,' yet Swift 
complains that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he 
' had always some poetical scheme in his head.' It was punctually 
required that his writing-box should be set upon his bed before he 
rose ; and Lord Oxford's domestic related that, in the dreadful 
w'r.ter of '40, she was called from her bed by him four times in 
one night, to supply him with paper lest he should lose a thought. 

" He pretends insensibility to censure and criticism, though it 
was observed by all who knew him that every pamphlet disturbed 
his quiet, and that his extreme irritability laid him open to per- 
petual vexation ; but he wished to despise his critics, and therefore 
hoped he did despise them. As he happened to live in two reigns 
when the court paid little attention to poetry, he nursed in his 
mind' a foolish disesteem of kings, and proclaims that ' he never 
sees courts.' Yet a little regard shown him by the Prince of Wales 
melted his obduracy ; and lie had not much to say when he was 
asked by his Royal Highness, ' How he could love a prince while 
he disliked kings.' " 

Johnson's best poetry is the versifiied expression of the tone of 
sentiment with which we are already familiar. The Vanity of 
Hiima)i IVislies is, perhaps, the finest poem written since Pope's 
time and in Pope's manner, with tiie exception of Goldsmith's still 
finer performances. Johnson, it need hardly be said, has not 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. ug 

Goldsmith's exquisite fineness of touch and delicacy of sentiment. 
He is often ponderous and verbose, and one feels that the mode of 
expression is not that which is most congenial ; and yet the vigour 
of thought makes itself felt through rather clumsy modes of utter- 
ance. Here is one of the best passages, in which he illustrates the 
vanity of military glory : — 

On what foundation stands the warrior's pride, 
How just his hopes let Swedish Charles decide ; 
A frame of adamant, a soul of fire, 
No dangers fright him and no labours tire ; 
O'er love, o'er tear, extends his wide domain, 
Unconquer'd lord of pleasure and of pain ; 
No joys to him pacific sceptres yield, 
War sounds the trump, he rushes to the field ; 
Behold surrounding kings their powers combine, 
And one capitulate, and one resign : 
Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain. 
"Think nothing gain'd," he cries, "till nought remain- 
On Moscow's walls till Gothic standards fly, 
And all be mine beneath the polar sky." 
The march begins in military state. 
And nations on his eve suspended wait ; 
Stern Famine guards the solitary coast, 
And Winter barricades the realms of Frost. 
He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay- 
Hide, blushing glory, hide Pultowa's day ! 
The vanquish'd hero leaves his broken bands. 
And shows his miseries in distant lands ; 
Condemn'd a needy supplicant to wait. 
While ladies interpose and slaves debate- 
But did not Chance at length her error mend "i 
Did no subverted empire mark his end .'' 
Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound ? ^ 

Or hostile millions press him to the ground .' 
His fall was destined to a barren strand, 
A petty fortress and a dubious hand ; 
He left the name at which the world grew pale, 
To point a moral and adorn a tale. 

The concluding passage may also fitly conclude this survey of 
Johnson's writings. The sentiment is less gloomy than is usual, 
but it gives the answer which he would have given in his calmer 
moods to the perplexed riddle of life ; and, in some form or other, 
it is, perhaps, the best or the only answer that can be given : — 

Where, then, shall Hope and Fear their objects find ? 

Must dull suspense corrupt the stagnant mind .'' 

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, 

Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate ? 

Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise .'' 

No cries invoke the mercies of the skies .'' 

Inquirer cease ; petitions yet remain 

Which Heaven may hear, nor deem religion vain 



I20 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Still raise for good the supplicating voice, 

But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice 

Safe in His power whose eyes discern afar 

The secret ambush of a specious prayer. 

Implore His aid, in His decisions rest, 

Secure whate'er He gives — He gives the best. 

Yet when the scene of sacred presence fires, 

And strong devotion to the skies aspires, 

Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind, 

Obedient passions and a will resign'd ; 

For Love, which scarce collective men can fill ; 

For Patience,, sovereign o'er transmuted ill ; 

For Faith, that panting for a happier seat. 

Counts Death kind nature's signal of retreat. 

These goods for man the laws of Heaven ordain, 

These goods He grants who grants the power to gain 

With these Celestial Wisdom calms the mind, 

And makes the happiness she does not find. 



ENOCH MOEGAIif'S SONS' 




SAPCLIO 



CLEANS 

WINDOWS, 
MAEBLE, 

KNIVES. 

P0LTSHE3 

XIN-WARE, 

IKON,STEEL,&o. 




GRAND, SQUARE AND UPRIGHT 



Rece ived Fir st Medal of Meri t and Di- 
pjoma of Honor at the Centennial Exhi- 
bition, 1 876. 

First Prize Diploma of Honor and Hon- 



orable Mention and a Diploma of Special 
Excellence for Baby Grands at the Mon- 
treal Exhibition, 1 88 1 . 

Are pi'eferi'ecl fyy leading A^rtists. 

SOHMER &o CO-^ 

Manufacturers. 149 to 155 FOURTEENTH STREET, N. Y. 




ES PYLF" 




THE BEST 

WASHING COMPOUND 

EVER INVENTED- 
No Lady, Married or 
Single* Rich or Poor, 
Housekeeping or Board- 
ing, will be without it 
a<f6er testing its utility. 
Sold by all fi.rst-claBS 
Grocers* but beware of 
worthless imitations. 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY ADVERTISER. 



POPULAR HO VELS REGEHTLV PUBLISHED. 

Mr. William Black's New Novel, 
YOLANDE, The Story of a Daughter, 
By William Black, Author of "Shandon Bells," "A Princess of 
Thule," "The Strange Adventuresof a Phaeton," etc.; 1 voL, 
12mo., cloth, gilt, $1.00; 1 vol., 12mo., paper, 50 cents; also 
in Lovell's LieraPvY, No. 13G, 20 cents. 
"A thoroughly pleasant, readable | numerous admirers that his right 



book, showing all Mr. Black's best 
q'i;ilitics as a novelist."— /'a^i McM 
VazelU. 

"The novel will satisfy Mr. Blaclv's 



hand has lost none of its cuuuin£ 
—St. James' Gazette. 

" 'Yolandc' will please and interest 
many."— Wfiitekall Eevieio. 



The LADIES LIKDOllES. By Mrs. Oliphant. Originally 
X<\\h\\s\\ei\\\\ BlaclcLCOod's Magazine. 1 vol., 12mo , cloth, gilt, ' 



"She is always reariable. but never 
to (.'iitertaiumg as wh'ju shu lays the 
Kcmj ill Scotland . It is impossil)le 
tn imasrine sketches more lifelike than 
lll(i)^^e of old Roils, t' e i,ra<;niatic but- 
ler ,. of Wiss Baibara Eiskine, the 
hii^h-spiritcd, puiici liou;, but sensi- 
ble old aunt; of Lord Kintoul, the 
weakly yet coolly pellih and sensible 
youiis lord o( the OidiiKiiy y'onn:^' 



laird John Erskine, and of the most 
modern of marquises, Lord Mille- 
fiQxn-a'''— Spectator. 

" 'The Ladies Liudores' is in every 
respect excellent ...There are two 
girls at leaet in this book who mij.;ht 
make the fortune of any novel, being 
dcliciously feminine and natural. "- 
Salun.tc.y Eevieiv. 



LOYS, LORD BEBESFOliD, and o.her Tales. By the 

Authorof "Phyllis," "Molly Bawn," "Mi-.=;. Geoffrey," etc. 

1 vol., 12ino.,clo'.h, gilt, fl.OO; also in Lovell's Library,No. 

126, 1 V >]., ISuio., paper cover, 20 cents. 

"That delightful writer, the author i ular. There is someihing good in all 

of 'Phyllis,' ha« given us a collection of them, and one or two are especially 

of stories which cannot fail to he pon- I r;icy and piriuaut."- The Acad<,]iiy 

NO NEW THING. Qy W. E. Norris, Author of "Mah'i 
inony," "Mademoiselle de Mersac," etc. 1 vol., 12mo., cloth, 
gilt, 11.00; also in Lovell's Library, No. 108, 20 cents. 

'■ 'No New Tiling' I i blight, rv'udable 
and clever, and in every scn^e of the 
word a thoroughly interesting book." 



'Mr. Noiris his succeeded. H 
story, 'No New Thing,' is a very curi- 
ous one Theie is unmistaliabic 

capacity in his work.'"- Spcftalor. . 

ARDEN. By A. M \r\ V. Robinson 



Library, No. 134, 15 cents. 
"Miss Robin.^on must certainly be 
•igratulated on having scored a suc- 
.-satthe very beginning of her ca- 
'Arden' is an extremely clever 



V/litf/ir/'l h'eCkW 

, 13tiio., in Lovell's 



1 



acter. Bi ought up in Rome, on the 
death of her father, Arden returns to 
his native village in Warwickshire, 
there to make acquaintance with the 



ctory, and though it is one merely of j truest and fresue.'^t country jieople ve 



,'ry day life yet the incidents are f-o 
clothed as to appear fresh and new, 
andthesceni of the hay throughout 
is invigorating and refreshing. The 
heroine, who gives her name to the 
book, is a wild, impnlsive creature 
whom one cannot lieipliking, in spite 
of various weaknesses in her cb.'r 



have ever met on p.ipcr. The story 
is simply that of Ai den's life and 
marriage, but it is never wearisimie 
because of the sharpness of the writ- 
ing, and we have tothi nk Miss Robin- 
^on for; very good novel ii.deed ' — 
Whitehall JiiVicw. 



Xcw York I<»H^ W. I.OVIEI-I- COMPANY. 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY ADVERTISER. 
RECENTLY PUBLISHED: 

aNDEROROUND RUSSIA^ 

Rfcvolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. 

8y STEPNIAK, formerly Editor of " Zemlia i Volia " (Land and 

Liberty). With a Preface by PETER LAVROFB. Translated 

from the Italian. 1 vol. 12mo.5 paper cover, Lovell's Library, 

No. 173 price 20 cents, 

"The book is as yet unique in literature; it is a priceless contribution to 

our knowledge of Russian thought and feeling; as a true and faithful retlectiou 

of certain aspects of, perhaps, the most tremendous politicial movemeiH ;« 

history, it seems destined to become a standard work."— Athenaeum. 



le HIS] 

Prom the Earliest Times to the present day. 
By JUSTIN H. MeCARTHY. 1 vol. 13mo., Lovell's Libraiy 
No. 115, price 10 cents. 

"A timely and exceedingly vigorous and interesting little volume. The book 
is worthy of attentive perusal, and will be all the more interesting because it 
involves in its production the warm sympathies, the passionate enthusiasm, and 
the vivid brilliancy of style which one is gUid to welcome from the son of the 
distinguished journalist and author."'— Ciiui^tian World 

"All Irishmen who love tfeeir country, and all candid Englishmen.' ought to 
welcome Mr. Justin H. McCarthy's Utile volume — 'An Outline of Irish History.' 
Those who want to know how it has come about thut. as John Stuart Mill long 
ago pointed out, all cries for the remedy of specific Irish grievances are now 
merged in the dangerous demand for nationality, will do well to rcad^lr. 
McCarthy « little book. It is eloquently written, and carries us from the earlie. t 
legends to the autumn of 1832. The charm of the i-tyle and the imiietuousness 
in the flow of the narrative are refreshing and stimulating, and, as regards his- 
toric Impartiality, Mr. McCarthy is far more just thiiuisMr Fronde. '—GiiAPnic. 

"A brightly written and intelligent account of Ihe li-ading events in Irish 

annals Mr. McCarthy has performed a difficult task with commendable 

good spirit and impartiality.'"— Whitehall Review. 

'To those who enjoy exceptioually bvilliaLt and vigorous writing. a.s well 
as to those who desiie to post themselves up in the Irish "question, we cordially 
recommend Mr. MciJarthy's little book."— Evenhjg News. 



EHG-IiISH MEN OF I.ETTERS. 

Edited by JOHN MORLEY. 
Published in 12mo. vols., paper covers, price 10 cents each. 



Johnson By Leslie Stephen. 
Scott. By R. H. Hutton. 
CfiBBON. By J C. Morison. 
SuELtEY. By J. A. Symonds. 
Hume. By Prof. Huxley, P R.S. 
Goldsmith. By Wilhain Black. 
Depoe. ByW. Minto. 
Burns. By Principal Shairp. 
Spenser. By the Very Rev. the Dsan 
of St. Paul's. 



Thackeray. By A. Trollope. 
Burke. By Joha Albr ey. 
BuNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 
Pope. By L ^He Stephen. 
Byron. By Profes>or Nichol. 
Cowper. By Cioldwin Smith 
Locke. By Professor Fov/ler. 
Wordsworth. By P. W. H.Myers. 
Mllton. By Mark Pattison. 
Soutiiet. By Profei-sor Dowdeu. 
Chaucer. Ey Prof. A. W. Ward. 



yew York: JOHN W. L,0\EIiLi COMPANY. 



HEART AND SCIENCE. 

.By NA/^ILKIE COLLINS. 

1 Vol., 12mo., cloth, gilt $1.00 

1 '■ " paper 50 

Also in Loveirs Library, No. 87 20 

" Benjnlia'' is a singularly interesting, and, in a way, fascinating creat'on. 
Mr. Collins can deal gtiougly with a st"ong situation, but he has dune uothii.g 
more powerful than his sketch of Benjulia's lust hours. Mr, Gallilee and Zoe 
are capital examples of genuine and unforced humor; and the book, as a 
whole, is thoroughly readable and enthralling from its first page to its last."— 
Academy. 

" Mr. Wilkie Collins' latest novel is certainly oiv! of the ablest he has writ- 
ten. It is quite the equal of 'The Woman in White' and of 'The Moon- 
stone,' consijquently it may truthfully be de;^cribed as a masterpiece in ti.e 
peculiar liue of fiction in which Mr. Collins not, only excels but distances every 
rival ia ttie walk of literature he has marked out for himself. 'Hcirt and 
Science ' is in its way a great novel, certainly the best we have seen from Mr. 
Wilkie Collins since ' The Woma'i iu White ' and ' Armada e.' " — Morninrj Post. 

" We doubt whether the author has ever written a cleverer story. . . . An 
eloquent and touching tribute to the blessedness and power of a true and 
loving heart. The book unites in a high degree the attractions of thrilling nar- 
rative and clever portraiture of character, of sound wis.;om and real humor." — 
Congregationalisi. 

By OUIDA. 

1 vol., 12mo., cloth, gilt $1.00 

1 " " paper 50 

Also in Lovell's Library, No. 112, 2 parts, each 15 

"'Wanda' is the story by which Ouida will probably be judged by the 
literary historian of the future, for it is distinguished by all her hiuh merits, 
and not disfigured by any on.- of her few defects. In pointof coustruetiou this 
most rece.it contribution to tlie flctioiialliteratnre of the day is perfect; the 
dialogues are both brilliant and stirring, and the descriptive passages are mas- 
terpieces. Ouida is seen at her brightest and be~t in 'Wanda' the bo k thrills 
by its dramatic interest, and delights by its singular freshness and unconven- 
tional style. There are no more attractive characters in English fiction than 
Wanda and tier peasant husband, and increased fame must result to the bril- 
liant novelist from this her latest work."- St.. Stephen s Eevieiv. 

" We do not know anything Ouida has done that equals this, her latest 
novel, in power of delineating character and describing scenery. Wanda is a 
iue, liigh-soiiled character." — Citii:en. 

'A powerful and fascinating novel, deeply interesting, with excellent 
character portrayal, and v.-ritten in that, sparkling stvle for which Ouida is 
famous. ' Wanda ' deserves to take rank by the side of the best of her previous 
novels." — Darlington yo.ii. 

"' Wanda ' contains much that is striking. The central idea is finely 
woT'ked out. We have seen nothing from Ouida's pen that strikes us as bein^;, 
on the whole, so well conceived and so skilfully wrought out." — Spectator. 

JOHN W. LOVELL CO., 

14 & 16 Vesey Street, New York. 



I^E:OH]2SrT3L,-Y' FXJBI^IStlEID, 



Attractive new editions of tlie following celebrated works of Sir Edward 
Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 

By LORD LYTTON. 

1 vol., 12mo., large type, ^ood paper, well bound, eloth, gilt, $1 00; also in 
Lovell's Library, handsome paper cover, 20 ci;nts. 

This work is happily conceived and ably executed. It is flowing and grace- 
ful in style and both piques and rewards the curiosity of the reader. 



THE COMING RACE; 

Or, THE NEW UTOPIA. 

By LORD LYTTON. 

1 vol., 12mo., lar^';', clear type, goo-i paper, attr.ictive cover, 10 cents. 

Without deciding on the comparative share of imagination and niemory in 
the concoction of the work, we may pronounce it one of the most attractive 
books of the many interesting volumes of this popular author. 



A STRANGE STORY. 

By LORD LYTTON. 

1 vol., 12mo , cloth, gilt, $1.00 also in Lovell's Library, handsome cover, 
20 cents. 

The plot shows di.«criminatioii of judgment as well as force of expression, 
and its vigor of conception and brilliancy of description makes it one of nis 
most readable novels. 



THE HAUNTED HOUSE; 

Ob, The House and the Brain, to which is added, Caldekon, tub 
Courtier 

By LORD LYTTON. 

1 vol., 12mo., large type, good paper, handsome cover, 10 cents. 
This is a weird imaginative creation of singular power, showing intensity of 
conception and a knowledge of the remarkable effects of spiritual influences. 
Full D«scriptive Catalogue sent on application. 

JOHN W. LOVELL CO., Publishers, 

14 tfc 16 Vesey Street, New York. 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY ADVERTISER. 



VICE VERSA; 

Or, A LESSON TO FATHERS. 

By F. ANSTEY. 

1 vo. , 12mo., cloth gilt, S! 00 1 vol . Itjinn , paper. 50 cents; also in Lovell's 
Library No. 30, ^0 cents 

EXTRACTS FROM NOTICES BY THE PRESS. 

THE SATURDAY KKVIEW — " If there ever was a book made up from 
begiimiiij^ to end ol luu^blei-, yet not a comic book, or a 'nieny' book, or a 
book of joke?, or a book of pictures, or a jest book, or a toml'ool book, but a 
perfectly sober and serious book, in ttie readins; of which a sober man may 
laugh withojt shame fiom beginning to end it is the book called ~ Vice 
Versa; or. a Lesson to Fathers.' Vye close the book, roccnimending it 

wry earnestly to all fathers, in the fir»t instance, aud their sous, nephews, 
uncles, and male cousins next." 

THE PALL MALL GAZETTE.—'" Vice Verca is one of the nw t 
diverting books that we have read for many a day. J( is equally calculated lo 
amutc the AuEjust idler, and to keep up the spirits of t-ose who stay in toi' n 
and work, while others are holiday making The book is singularly wtll 

written, graphic, terse, and fall of nerve. The schoolboy conversations are 
lo the life, and every scene is brislv and well considered.'' 

THE ATHEN.EUM.— "The whole 8tory is told with delightful drollery 
and spirit, and there is not a dull page in the volume. It shou'd he added that 
Mi.Anstey writes well, and in a style admirably suited tohisamusiug subject • 

THE SPECTATOR — " Mr. Anstey deserves the thanks of everybody for 
Bhov.iiig that there is still a little fuu left m this world . . It is Ions e.nce we 
read anything more truly humorous We must admit that we have not 

laughed so heartily over anything for some yeais bacii as we have over this 
' Lesson for F.-ithers.' " 

THE ACADEMY — " It is certainly tbr lest hook of its kind that has ap 
peared for a long time, and in the way of provoking laughter by certain old- 
fashioLsed means, which do not involve salire or sarcasm, it has tew rivals." 

THE WORLD.—" The idea of a father and son exchanging their identity 
has suggested itself to inaiu' minds before now. It is illu.'-trated in this book 
with surprising freshness, originality and force . The book is more than 
wildly comic and amusing; it is in parts exceedingly pathetic " 

THE COLRT JOUknAi..- 'The story is told with so much wit and 
gayety that we caunot be deceived in our impressior. of the future career of F. 
Anstey being destined to attain the greatest success among the most popular 
authors of the day." 

VANITY FAlu — '-The book is, in our opinion, the drollest work ever 
vritten in the English language." 

TRUTH.—" Mr. Anstey has done an exceedingly difficult thing so admira- 
bly and artfully as to conceal its difficulties. Haven't for years read 80 irresist- 
ibly humorous a book." 

NEW YORK: 

JOHN W. LOVELL CO., 14 and 16 Vesey Street. 



LOVELUS LIBRARY 



AHEAD OF ALL COMPETITORS. 



The improvements being constantly made in ''Lovell's 
Library " have placed it in the Front Rank of cheap publi- 
cations in this country. The publishers propose to still 
further improve the series by having 

BETTER PAPER, 

BETTER PRINTING, 

LARGER TYPE, 

and more attractive cover than any other series in the market. 



SEE 'V7':EK.A.rr XS SJ^XID of XT: 

The following extract from a' letter recently received 
shows the appreciation in which the Library is held by those 
who most constantly read it: 

"Mercanth.e Library, } 
"Bal'iimore August 29, 1883. i 
" WiU you kindly send me two copies of your latest list ? I am 
glad to see that you now issue a volume every day- Your Library v?e 
find greatly preferable to the ' Sea-ide ' and ' Franklin Square ' Series, 
and even better than the 12Lao. form of the latter, the page being of 
better shape, the lines better leaded, and the words better spaced. 
Altogether your series is much more in favor with our subscribers tliiin 
( i'her of its rivals. 

"S. C. DONALDSON, Assistant Librarian." 



JOHN W LOVELIj CO., Publishers, 

1-4: Ss IS Vesey Street, ITew 'STork.. 



JUST PUBLISHED. 



"BEYOND THE SUNRISE;" 

Observations by Two Travelers. 

I vol. I'^imo, cloth, gilt, $1.00 

1 vol. 12mo, paper, - - - ^ - - =.50 
Also in Lovell's Library, No. 1G9, - - - . .30 



Tilt jubjccts treated in 'SaIh volume, vvhicli is the pro- 
duction of two Avell known American writers, arc Psychology, 
Clairvoyance and Theosophy. In the form of sketches they 
outline the philosophy of Psychology, and relate i)henomena 
wholly outside of, and apart from Spiritualism, with which it 
is associated in the 2)opular mind in this country. These two 
writers have much to say regarding Occultism and Theosophy; 
and, in a word, discuss the science of the soul in all its bear- 
ings. No more interesting book has ever appeared on these 
subjects. Much personal experience, whicli is always interest- 
ing, is given in its pages; and tlie authors Avho have chosey 
to be anonymous, have had remarkable results in their stud^ 
of Spiritualism and Clairvoyancy, and are adepts in Ps3Tho- 
logical researches. 

From all the varied avenues in wliich they have worked 
so perse veringiy, tlioy have bro light together a highly grati- 
fying mass of materjal. The volume is one in Avhich agnostics, 
spiritualists, orthodox and scientific minds generally, will be 
deeply interested ; and it is written in so earnest and frank a 
spirit, and in language so clear and graceful, that " Beyond 
the Sunrise,", will win a welcome in every household. It will 
give good cheer and inspiration wherever it is read. 

Sent free, by post, on receipt of price. 

.JOHIT W. LOVELL CO.,PulDlisliers, 

J 4 and Id f'eset/ Street, New Vcrkt 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY.-CATALOGUE. 



185. Mysterious Island, Pt II. 15 
Mysterious Island, Ptlll. 15 

1S6. Tom Brown at Oxford, 
2 Parts, each 15 

187. Thicker than Water 20 

iSS. In Silk Attire 20 

189. Scottish Chiefs, Part I.. 20 
Scottish Chiefs, Part II. 20 

190. Willy Reilly .^ 20 

191. The Nautz Family 20 

zg2. Great Expectations 20 

19;. Hist.of Pendennis.Pt I..20 

Hist. of Pendennis,Pt II 20 
19). Widow Bedott Papers ..20 
J95. Daniel Deronda, Part I.. 20 

Daniel Deronda, Part II. 20 

jg6. Altiora Peto 20 

T97. By the Gate of the Sea. .15 

19S. Tales of a Traveller 20 

199. Life and Voyages of Co- 
lumbus, 2 Parts, each. 20 
•200. The Pilgrim's Progress.. 20 
loi. MartinChuzzlewit,P'rt 1. 20 

MartinChuzzlewit,P't II. 20 

'. 02. Theophrastus Such 10 

i L) j . Disarmed 15 

204. Eugene Aram 20 

205. The Spanish Gypsy, &C.20 

206. Cast up by the Sea 20 

207. Mill on the Floss, Part 1. 15 
Mill on the Floss, P't 1 1 . 1 5 

20S. Brother Jacob, etc 10 

2og. The Executor 20 

210. American Notes 15 

211. The Newcomes, Part I.. 20 
The Newcomes, Part II. 20 

212. The Privateersman 20 

213. The Three Feathers 20 

2 14. Phantom Fortune 20 

215. The Red Eric 20 

210. Lady Silverdale's Sweet- 
heart 10 

217. The Four Macnicol's. ..10 
2 rS.Mr.PisistratusBrown,M.P.io 

219. Dombeyand Son,P.irt L20 
Dombey and Son, Part II. 20 

220. Book of Snobs 10 

221. Fairy Tales, Illustrated.. 20 

222. The Disowned 20 

223. Little Dorrit, Part 1 20 

Little Dorrit, Part 1 1 20 

•24. Abbotsford and New- 
stead Abbey 10 

^25, Oliver Goldsmith, Black 10 

226. The Fire Brigade 20 

227. Rifle and Hound in Cey- 
lon 20 

22S. Our Mutual Friend, P't 1. 20 
OurMutualFriend, P't 11.20 

229. Paris Sketches 15 

230. Belinda 20 

231. Nicholas Nickleby.P't 1. 20 
NicholasNicklebv.P't n.20 

232. Monarch of Mincing 

Lane 20 

233. Eight Years' Wanderings 

in Ceylon 20 

234. Pictures from Italy 15 

235. Adventures of Philip, Pt 1. 15 
Adventures of Philip, Pt II.15 

236. Knickerbocker History 

" of New York 20 



237. The Boy at Mugby 10 

238. The Virginians, Part I.. 20 
The Virginians, Part II. 20 

23g. Erling the Bold 20 

240. Kenelm Chillingly 20 

241. Deep Down 20 

242. Samuel Brohl & Co 20 

243. Gautran 20 

244. Bleak House, Part I 20 

Bleak House, Part 1 1... 20 

245. What Will He Do With 

It ? 2 Parts, each 20 

246. Sketches of YoungCouples. 10 

247. De vereux 20 

248. Life of Webster, Part 1. 15 
Life of Webster, Pt. II.15 

249. The Crayon Papers 20 

250. The Caxtons, Part L • • ■ iS 
The Caxtons, Part it ... 1 5 

251. Autobiography of An- 

thony Trollope 20 

252. Critical Reviews, etc. ... 10 

253. Lucretia 20 

254. Peter the Whaler 20 

255. Last of the Barons. Pt Lis 
Last of the Barons,Pt.II.i5 

256. Eastern Sketches 15 

257. All in a Garden Fair 20 

258. File No. 113 20 

259. The Parisians, Part I... 20 
The Parisians, Part II.. eg 

260. Mrs. Darling's Letters. . .20 

261. Master Humphrey's 
Clock 10 

262. Fatal Boots, etc 10 

263. The Alhambra 15 

264. The Four Georges 10 

265. Plutarch's Lives, 5 Pts. $1. 

266. Under the Red Flag 10 

267. TheHaunted House, etc. 10 

268. When the Ship Comes 
Home '. 10 

269. One False, both Fair 20 

270. The Mudfog Papers, etc. 10 

271. My Novel, 3 Parts, each.20 

272. Conquest of Granada. ..20 

273. Sketches by Boz 20 

274. A Christmas Carol, etc. . 15 

275. lone Stewart 20 

276. Harold, 2 Parts, each... 15 

277. Dora Thorne 20 

278. Maid of Athens. 20 

279. Conquest of Spain 10 

2S0. Fitzboodle Papers, etc. . lO 

281. Bracebridge Hall 20 

282. Uncommercial Traveller.20 

283. Roundabout Papers 20 

284. Rossmoyne 20 

285. A Legend of the Rhine, 

etc 10 

286. Cox's Diary, etc 10 

287. Beyond Pardon 20 

288. Somebody'sLuggage,etc. 10 

289. Godolphin 20 

290. Salmagundi 20 

2gi. Famous Funny Fellows. 20 

292. Irish Sketches, etc 20 

293. The Battle of Life, etc... 10 

294. Pilgrims of the Rhine ... 1 5 

295. Random Shots 20 

296. Men's Wives 10 

297. Mystery of Edwin Drood.20 



299 
300, 
301. 
302. 
303. 
304. 
305. 
306. 

307- 
308. 

309. 

310. 

3". 

312. 

313- 
314. 
3>5. 
316. 

317- 
318. 
319- 
320. 
321. 

322. 
323. 
324- 
325- 
326. 
327- 
328. 
329- 
330. 
331. 
332. 
333 
334 
335 
336 
337' 
33B. 
339' 
340. 
341. 
342. 
343' 
344. 
345' 

346. 
347 
348. 
349 
350 
35' 

352 
353 

354. 
355' 

356. 
357. 
358. 
359. 

360. 



Reprinted Pieces la 

Astoria 20 

Novels by Eminent Handsio 
Companions of Columbus2a 

No Thoroughfare 10 

Character Sketches, etc. 10 

Christmas Books to 

A Tour on the Prairies... 10 

Ballads 15 

Yellowplush Papers 10 

Life of Mahomet, Part 1.1$ 
Life of Mahomet, Pt. II. 13 
Sketches and Travels in 

London lo 

Oliver Goldsmith,Irving.20 
Captain Bonneville .... 20 

Golden Girls 20 

English Humorists 15 

Moorish Chronicles 10 

Winifred Power 20 

Great HoggartyDiamond 10 

Pausanias 15 

The New Abelard 20 

A Real Queen 20 

The Rose and the Ring.20 
Wolfert's Roost and Mis- 
cellanies, by Irving.. . • 10 

Mark Seawo'rth 20 

Life of Paul Jones 20 

Round the World 20 

Elbow Room 20 

The Wizard's Son 25 

Harry Lorrequer 20 

How It All Came Round.20 
Dante Rosetti's Poems. 20 

The Canon's Ward 20 

Lucile, by O. Meredith. 20 
Every Day Cook Book.. 20 

. Lays of Ancient Rome. . 20 

. Life of Burns 20 

The Young Foresters. .. 20 
John Bull andHis Island 20 
Salt Water, by Kingston. 20 

The Midshipman 20 

Proctor's Poems 20 

Clayton's Rangers 20 

Schiller's Poems -20 

Goethe's Faust 20 

Goethe's Poems 20 

Life of Thackeray 10 

Dante's Vision of Hell, 
Purgatory and Paradise . . 20 

An Interesting Case 20 

Life of Byron, Nichol. . . 10 

. Life of Bunyan 10 

Valerie's Fate 10 

Grandfather Lickshingle.20 
Lays of the Scottish Ca- 
valiers 20 

Willis' Poems 20 

Tales of the French Re- 
volution 15 

Loom and Lugger ...... 20 

More Leaves from a Life 

in the Highlands 15 

Hygiene of the Brain. ..25 

Berkeley the Banker 20 

Homes Abroad 15 

Scott's Lady of the Lake, 

with notes 2c 

Modern Christianity a • 
civilized Heathenism.. . . 1 r 



BRAQT Airs WSRVS FOOD, 




Vitalized PItos-pliites, 

COMPOSED OF THE NERVE-GIVING PRINCIPLES OF 
THE OX-BRAIN AND WHEAT-GERM. 

It restores the energy lost by Nervousness or Indigestion; relieves 
Lassitude and Neuralgia; refreshes the nerves tired by worry, excite- 
ment, or excessive brain fatigue; strengthens a failing memory, and 
gives renewed vigor in all diseases of Nervous Exhaustion or DebilitVa 
ft U the only PREVENTIVE FOR CONSUiVIPTlON. 

It aids wonderftdly in the mental and bodily growth of infants and 
children. Under its use the teeth come easier, the bones grow better, the skin 
plumper and smoother; tJie brain acquires mare readily, and rests and sleeps 
more sweetly. An ill- fed brain learns no lessons, and is excusable if peevish. 
It ffvoes a happier and better childhood, 

"It is witli the utmost confidence tiat I recommend tliis excellent pre- 
paration for the relief of indigestion and for general debility; nay, I do more 
than recommend, 1 really urge all invalids to put it to the test, for in sev- 
eral cases personally known to me signal benefits have been derived from 
its use. I have recently watched its effects on a young friend who has 
Buffered from indigestion all her life. After taking the Vitalized Phos- 
phites for a fortnight she said to me; ' I feel another person; it is a pleas- 
ure to live.' Many hard-working men and women — especially those engaged 
in brain work—would be saved from the fatal resort to chloral and other 
destructive stimulantsii, if %'k®f wobM have recourse to a remedy so simple 
and so efticacious. '" 

Emily FArrHFUjiA. 

PhTSICIAHS hats PHRSCRIBBD over 600,000 FACKAOES BSCAtriS THBT 
XMOW IT8 COMPOSITIOH, THAT IT 18 NOT A SECRET REICKOT, A»® 

THAT THE FORMiiXLA IS PRINTED ON KVEEt LABWa ^ 

For Sale by Drusfflat* or t>y 9f all, llXa ' 

F. CROSBY CO., 56 West 25th Street. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: l\/1agnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
rr=i.-ihprrv TnwnshiD. PA 16066 



